A Google operating system, called Google Chrome OS, is on the way, the web giant announced last night. The open-source operating system will be an extension of the Chrome browser and will initially be targeted at netbooks. The first devices running the Chrome OS will be released in the second half of 2010, Google says.

The new operating system isn't just Windows-by-Google. It's Google's answer to the question of how the Internet and the desktop ought to relate. Technology has come a long way from when the browser was just another desktop application and Google has worked hard to encourage the use of Web applications, creating, for example, Google Docs, which emphasizes the ease of collaboration. Technologies such as Google Gears allow Web applications to run even offline, bringing them back to the desktop.

With Chrome OS, the company unveils a vision of the computer and the Internet being one and the same. Google believes this will solve many of the problems that consumers have with their computers today. The post on Chrome OS says:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear -- computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.

Google's plan seems to be to address these issues removing much of what currently resides below the browser. A computer can continue to run quickly, for example, if it's not weighted down by more installed applications and stored files.

I'm fascinated in particular by the mention of configuring hardware. There are a lot of drivers out there to make devices work with Microsoft Windows, while Apple deals with this issue by maintaining fanatic control over the devices that connect to its operating system. Google seems to be suggesting that the Web could become the link between a user's computer and other devices.

This is right on trend. Two weeks ago, for example, HP announced the Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web, an Internet-connected printer that can access Websites directly through applications. I can imagine how Internet-connected devices could lighten the load on the operating system a great deal, allowing the user to interact with them through Web pages. There would certainly be issues with security, but I think this is the direction that would allow a stripped-down operating system focused on the Web to really take off.

I first learned about Adobe's Web word processor, Buzzword, when writing about the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which is designed to let programmers use Web technologies to build desktop applications that can run both online and off. Buzzword (which is still in beta) was a favorite example of the executives I interviewed, and it was obvious why AIR would be useful for a Web word processor. So I went home and got a Buzzword account, excited about having access to my documents from any machine or operating system, and about being able to use the system even while on the plane.

I've been using Buzzword for more than a year now (I'm writing this post with it), and there's still no offline mode. Buzzword has a fabulous user interface that's kept me hooked, but I've been active--possibly annoying--about giving feedback to the developers, and asking them for offline support once every few months. Recently, I got a chance to talk with Buzzword founder Rick Treitman, who is currently an "entrepreneur-in-residence" with Adobe, and he explained the holdup to me.

Buzzword, like most Web applications, is designed with plenty of collaboration tools. While making it work with AIR for a single user is easy to do, Treitman says, collaboration adds significant obstacles. For example, say that I work on a document offline while my writing partner works online. When I go back online, what happens to the document? Treitman says that the Buzzword team is working to make this situation resolve itself as automatically as possible, but that it requires significant work on the software's back end.

The two big reasons to use a Web word processor are ubiquitous access--which I want to include offline access--and easy collaboration. I'm looking forward to seeing how the Buzzword team resolves the way that the two interfere with each other.

Last weekend, Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard showed off some of the features that will appear in the next version of Firefox at the Southern California Linux Expo.

Firefox 3.1 takes several important steps toward beefing up the browser's ability to run Web applications, one of which is that it adds support for "worker threads." These allow the browser to deal with heavier computation--if it needs to do something data-intensive, JavaScript can run in the background, while the user goes on interacting with the application as normal. This capability is very important for sophisticated Web applications and, in an impressive Firefox 3.1 demo, Blizzard showed off a browser application capable of detecting motion in a live video as it played (see the clip below). Without worker threads, there's no way that the application could have handled this without locking up.

Maybe you're not planning to run a browser application that parses the feed from your security camera? A less flashy but equally important example of the concept can be seen in the new Offline capability from Gmail Labs. Using offline mode, users can access Gmail online or off (or in "flaky connection mode," which smooths out the experience of a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't Internet connection, or a four-hour Gmail outage). One key part of the underlying technology is WorkerPool, which, like Firefox's worker threads, allows intense computation to go on in the background while the user interacts with the Gmail interface. In a conversation I had recently with Gmail product manager Todd Jackson, he explained to me that WorkerPool is what allows Gmail to perform the heavy task of coordinating the data in a user's online Gmail account with what's stored offline, without forcing the user to wait for long periods while the browser responds.

These changes are just part of a larger trend of re-engineering browsers to improve their ability to handle Web applications. Google's Chrome browser is one example of this, as is work on the W3C's HTML 5 specification, which is making great strides in standards for Web applications.