Just a day after Google confirmed that it was cooking its own breed of open source operating system, the first screenshots allegedly depicting Google Chrome Operating System got leaked. The images are included into this article, but they are without any sort of value since they are shameless fakes. The Mountain View-based search giant has been mute on the matter so far, but the author of the images has now admitted to having created them.

“I am sorry if you believed it. It was a really bad attempt. You all are smart people. I never planned on it getting this big. But it did. (Come one, I know the Google logo. I am actually a graphic designer, I just wanted to see reactions if it was a crappy back),” the author of the fake screenshots explained. “I never was going to let this go on longer than 12 hours.”

The screenshots got some attention, but they were obvious fakes and were called as such by end users. Now, the travesty is over. Google is planning to offer developers in the open source community access to the Google Chrome OS later this year. The move will probably be the first taste that developers will get of Chrome OS, the platform that is scheduled for general availability in the second half of 2010. Just for fun, we have included below the details accompanying the fake screenshots.

The leaks were made up to appear as if they had come courtesy of an employee of an Acer supplier that attended a private demonstration for Acer from a Google representative. The demo involved an Acer Extensa 4620Z laptop, which has rather low, netbook-level specifications. The author of the fake screenshots indicated that the installation of the Google Chrome OS Developer Beta took only 10 minutes with a single restart. Details were also offered on a wizard designed to let users supply their data, apparently one aspect of the operating system that was still in development. Google Talk was the only application installed on the machine.

“This beta was extremely stripped down. However, it was amazingly fast. They did one reboot and it rebooted from Desktop to Desktop in about 25ish seconds,” the source of the leaks stated. “There is a button on the Chrome Bar (At least that is what the Rep called it.) that is basically the blue center of the chrome logo. This button pulls up a Start Menu clone essentially. The Reboot, Programs, and Main Directory is located here. The navigation uses two options: Exploration and Browser. Explanation is much alike the Windows Explorer. The Browser uses search options. In Browser Mode, the Google Chrome Browser comes up and you can search and also use the Most Visited features for your files.”

The Google Bar was reportedly set to autohide and could be brought up using the Windows key and Space. Apparently, Google wanted for Chrome OS machines to feature a key with the Chrome logo, just as computers do today for Windows.