Vishal Gupta :: Blog

Google may be pitching Chrome as a super-duper browser, but it's really showing off its shiny, new operating system. Remember, each of Chrome's tabs is a separate window--and while you might see each window displaying a Web page, Google's thinking about applications.

This is a direct attack on Microsoft -- and I think Microsoft is worried. That's because a small kernel on your local system could boot you into directly into Chrome, or a server-based operating system, and you could start working sans Windows.

This isn't what happens right now, but I'll bet it's Google's ultimate plan. That's a good thing, because I'm not wild about Chrome as a browser. Read Chrome? I Really Want To Love Ya for my perspective.

Head in the Clouds
The idea is cloud computing, where applications and data reside on servers, and it's taking hold. (See Zoho Adds Google Docs-like File Management and Working with Google Docs, part 1 and part 2.)

I know what you're thinking: Everything online? That's crazy. That's what I used to think, too.

Give Me a Fast Pipe
I remember Microsoft showing off a prerelease version of Windows 95 at a users group I used to manage. The presenter had an intriguing idea: Instead of doing research using Microsoft's CD-based encyclopedia program, Encarta, just reach out to Encarta on the Internet for fresh, dynamic data. Ditto for Word's connection to the Net.

The audience laughed -- so did I -- because few people had broadband; most were still suffering with dialup.

So cloud computing may be pie-in-the-sky right now, but five years down the road, try to visualize everyone having a steady, reliable, and super-fast broadband connection. You might not be laughing.

Worried that you can't work if you're kicked offline? "One important aspect to cloud computing," my buddy Paul Corning, a smart guy, said, "is that Chrome's Gears means you don't have to have continuous broadband access, and you can still work with browser-based applications when the Net's down." That's not new, either. Read Google Gears - Offline Functionality for Web Apps that explains how it works.

Google's OS Announcement
Google all but announced Chrome as an operating system in its recent blog entry, "A fresh take on the browser." In the third paragraph, the writers said:

"We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build." [Emphasis mine.]

  also read Google's Chrome aims to kill Windows, make Web the OS of choice. [Hat tip to WinPatrol's Bill.]

I encourage you to read Google's 38-page, Doonesbury-like comic that describes Chrome. Fair warning: I ran out of steam every so often -- some of the ideas forced me to do a little thinking. But stay with it -- the ideas and concepts pick up speed. And if you read between the lines you'll see where Google's going.

There is a new breakthrough and we can now expect our internet getting 100 times faster. Scientists at University of Sydney have taken four gruesome years to develop it but now, due to a small scratch on a piece of glass they say our internet is going to be faster than current Telstra networks.

The scratch means we will have almost an instantaneous access to the Internet which will be error-free anywhere in the world. 

"This is a critical building block and a fundamental advance on what is already out there. We are talking about networks that are potentially up to 100 times faster without costing the consumer any more," says Federation Fellow Professor Ben Eggleton, Director of CUDOS, based within the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

Eggleton, whose team beat their deadline by a year, says that up until now information has been moving at a slow rate but optical fibres have a huge capacity to deliver more. "The scratched glass we've developed is actually a Photonic Integrated Circuit," he says.

"This circuit uses the 'scratch' as a guide or a switching path for information - kind of like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity."

This initial demonstration proves it is possible to achieve speeds 60 times faster than current Australian Networks. With further development, the process is likely to produce even faster results.

"Currently we use electronics for our switching and that has been OK but as we move toward a more tech-savvy future there is a demand for instant web gratification. Photonic technology delivers what's needed and, more importantly, what's wanted."