14 DAY TRIAL // Google has found its groove with Chrome OS. Chromebooks are selling quite well; they're the only segment of the computer market that is growing. The next generation of Haswell-powered Chromebooks, coming next month or so, will do even more to push the idea of a web-powered operating system.
Still, plenty of people will be buying regular laptops with Windows on them. What's more, while many like the idea of a cheap, portable laptop, they may not be sold on Chrome OS just yet and buying a Chromebook and then finding out if they can live with the OS or not doesn't sound like a great idea.
This is what Google is trying to fix with a very bold experiment. The latest dev channel builds for Windows 8 pack a very interesting surprise, a full Chrome OS environment packed as a "Metro" app.
If you launch the Modern UI version of the latest Chrome, you'll not just get a browser window in full screen, you'll get the full Chrome OS desktop experience, complete with dock, app launcher, and browser windows.
That's a very bold move from Google, which clearly wants Chrome to be the sole interface for your computer. It would also love to get you to use as many Chrome apps as possible.
The search giant obviously wants to subvert Microsoft from the inside, but there's another side to this. Google isn't just building a Chrome OS replica inside Windows to spite Microsoft, it's also simply doing it because it can.
For the past couple of years or so, Google has been transforming Chrome from a "simple" browser into a platform. On the one hand, Chrome can run some pretty powerful apps thanks to the latest APIs. On the other, it's also been building a new graphics stack to handle everything from rendering to the "chrome," i.e. the UI, and to window positioning, for Chrome OS primarily.
With all these components already built into Chrome, it wasn't that hard to recreate the Chrome OS desktop inside the Windows app. While there's obviously some custom code and a lot of work involved, it's not as much as you'd imagine.
Google is just experimenting with all of this and it remains to be seen whether it goes anywhere, but it's not hard to imagine Chrome one day offering a full Chrome OS desktop experience on all the platforms the browser is available on, Windows, Mac, and Linux. The search giant may even be targeting the mobile space, if the new website launchers for Chrome are any indication.