Chrome OS will make its debut sometime later this year, most likely right in the middle of the holiday season. Now Network World (via Netbooked) has just learned that a business edition of Chrome OS will be launching as well. It will hit in 2011.
There are no hard details on the business edition yet. It is said to feature “more management muscle” (according to a Google software engineer) and a hell of a lot more security. Some Chrome OS netbooks could actually pack a hardware switch that allows you to toggle security functions and run in developer mode.
When not in dev mode, Business Edition Chromebooks will probably be considerably more limited than their civvy cousins. That’s about all we know for now, but stay tuned-this story will be developing for a while.
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While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has lost the most share since Chrome’s launch, Google has hurt Mozilla’s Firefox, too: Without Chrome, most of those gains probably would have been Firefox’s.
According to Web analytics firm Statcounter, Google Chrome represents about 7% of the market, up from 4% last September, when Chrome turned one year old. Firefox comes in at 31%, or roughly flat from last September. IE is about 55% of the market, down from 58% last September, according to Statcounter. We’ve seen similar growth on Business Insider: Chrome now represents 11% of visits, according to Google Analytics.
Chrome is one of the many ways Google is trying to kill Microsoft. We’ll see another one this year when Google begins shipping Chrome OS, an operating system based on the Chrome browser that could potentially threaten Microsoft’s Windows cash cow.
Google has stated that one of the reasons for acquiring Picnik was to have an online image editor that could work with their upcoming Google Chrome OS.
Google Chrome OS would be a cloud based operating system that would run pretty much from inside a web browser.
Since Google does not plan to bundle any application with the operating system itself, they are aiming to have online editions of most of the routing stuff.
Google already has an online office suite in the form of Google Docs. They also have storage on it. Google Picasa Web is an online storage for photos and videos. Picnik pretty much satisfies the need to have a functional image editor on Chrome OS.
Via, techwhack
