The 5 best features of Google Chrome OS

Google released the source code for Chrome OS and promised that devices will be shipping in about a year, in time for the 2010 holiday season. Chrome OS will run only on devices specifically manufactured for it and Google is dictating to manufacturers the hardware specifications. For instance, Chrome OS devices will be netbooks, will not include a hard drive, will have only solid state disks, will rely on specified WiFi chipsets/adapters for connectivity and must have full-sized keyboards, says Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management.

1. Speedy boot-up, as fast as three-seconds. A Chrome OS device will not store any applications on the device itself. Nadda, none, zippo, says Pichai. Likewise, it will include only the hardware, right down to the component level, that Google has approved in its hardware reference specification.

2. Security by default. The portion of the operating system needed to operate the device will reside in a read-only section of memory. The rest of the operating system is integrated with the Chrome browser and, like the browser, security updates require nothing more than a reboot. Chrome OS can run multiple Web applications in multiple tabs and each one is locked down from all others, so a vulnerability in one Web app can't lead to exposure in another.

3. Support for both x86 and ARM architectures. Google promises that it will be writing native code for both popular netbook CPUs.

4. The application menu. As new Web applications come online tweaked for Chrome OS, Chrome OS will showcase them on a permanent tab it now calls the application menu. This will help users find new applications. Developers with new apps will find this an easier method to showcase them, too. Any Web application that runs in a standards compliant browser should work on a Chrome OS device.

5. A surprising way to support Microsoft Office. If you ask a Google executive any question involving Microsoft, you'll hear the cliche answer -- that they company thinks only of users and not of its perceived competitors. But in one of the giggle-inducing moments of Thursday's demo, Pichai, showed how Chrome OS would handle Office documents -- via Microsoft Office Live, the free Web app version of Office available to Windows Live users.