This source reports:

In anticipation of a busy year of development, Google open-sourced the code on Wednesday. Now anyone can test and customize it. When Chrome OS launches, it will be only available on new netbooks with hardware Google has certified, said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management.

"We are completely going to be developing this in the open from now on," said Pichai, who spoke at a Webcast news conference Wednesday at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Chrome OS is an entirely new approach to computing. The average computer user spends most of his or her time on the Internet, so Google wants to cut out the middleman: the traditional operating system, which sits between a computer's hardware and a Web browser.

Chrome OS is a operating system that is a Web browser – or a Web browser that is an operating system. Essentially, it is Google's current browser, Chrome, bulked-up with systems for browsing files, connecting devices, printing documents and keeping the computer secure.

The operating system is designed only for using the Internet. Google is taking advantage of the fact that, these days, just about anything can be done on the Web.

"In Chrome OS, every application is a Web application," Pichai said. "There are no desktop applications."

Anyone who uses software that requires more snuff, such as a video-editing program, would need a traditional operating system like Windows or Mac OSX. That's why Chrome OS, Pichai said, is meant for companion PCs that are primarily used for Web surfing – a role that has largely been filled by netbooks.

Google is developing Chrome OS to only work on computers with solid-state memory, or flash drives. Except for the base operating system and some documents, all data is stored online – or in the cloud.

Chrome OS just takes that practice to the next level: everything, from text documents to PDFs, is stored in the cloud. More precisely, it's stored in data centers. People using Chrome OS, then, access all of their documents via the Web. Very little data is actually stored on the computer's local drive.

Hot damn.

Also notice this statement:

Also at the news conference, Google announced:
that 40 million people use the Chrome browser as their primary browser,
that the Chrome browser will soon officially be available for Mac and Linux,
that it is still working on finding a safe way to use HTML5 to take advantage of multicore processing and a computer's own graphics card.

Double Hot Damn - No more bloated CPU hogging FF on Ubuntu!!!