Exciting news for tech fans everywhere as Google announce they are setting their own operating system upon the world in the second half of 2010.

Initially targeted at Netbooks (incredibly small laptops with relatively low specifications), Google Chrome OS will be a lightweight, open source alternative to Windows. It will be designed primarily for online use, with the entire OS essentially consisting of the Google Chrome browser running on a Linux backend.

The idea being that in the future developers will produce web based applications that could be run from any Internet browser rather than a software package that requires a downloading and installation. This idea makes a great deal of sense in many ways, as you wouldn’t have to worry about software updates, creating backups of your files or transporting files from one machine to another. All information would be stored online so these usual factors would be an issue anymore.

In addition developers would have no need to worry about creating multiple versions of the same application for different Operating Systems because as long as the user’s browser was up to date they could run the software in question without issue. It would not matter whether Google Chrome OS, Mac OS or Windows was running on your computer you would still have access to all your online applications.

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The ambition Google holds is that eventually Chrome OS will develop in to something that could be seen as a viable alternative for use on all types of computer, not just Netbooks. Personally, I both love and hate this idea of shaking up the way we use our computers in equal quantities; the possibilities are huge but the disadvantages are potentially crippling and too obvious to ignore.

Firstly and most importantly there is the fact that the whole idea is pretty much reliant on the user having a continuous Internet connection. Nowadays this isn’t a problem for most homes and offices as an ‘always on’ broadband connection has become fairly standard. If however you were to find yourself without an Internet connection for whatever reason then your Operating System would immediately become useless. Whilst mobile broadband has become both faster and more affordable for those who don’t have a fixed Internet connection, it will be of little use on a plane for eight hours!

A potential workaround that springs to mind would be to allow the OS to download web applications and run them as if you were on the Internet. However by doing so, we neglect the purpose of having an online operating system in the first place.

It is also undeniable that at present most Internet applications are a little primitive. They have to be given credit for evolving incredibly quickly in recent years however they’re still a long way off representing a viable alternative to the large, installed applications most of us currently use. In the past I have discussed Internet based software such as Google Docs and in the future I plan to cover advanced online applications such as the drawing application SplashUp but these online versions still lag behind their desktop equivalents in both speed and functionality.

No one knows exactly what the future holds. It is undeniable that in the last couple of years our computing activities have become a lot more oriented around the Internet but whether we are ready for them to be entirely transferred remains to be seen.