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Google put its Chrome OS into open source yesterday and expects it to be available in devices a year from now. The operating system comes from a very different standpoint to Android, initially targeting netbooks but potentially overlapping with its stablemate in smartphones and smartbooks. It looks forward to the world Google envisages, where most functions and data are moved off the device and onto the network and the servers of the cloud, with applications running in the open browser.

Sundar Pichai, Google's VP of product management, said: "Google developers will be working off the same tree as external developers." The OS is still in an early stage of development, but is not a full blown operating system in the conventional sense. Instead it provides a layer of low level software beneath the Chrome browser, with most of the work and development being done there. This could drive the evolving mobile internet device category into even more browser-oriented formats than the current designs being pushed by the cellphone community, notably Qualcomm and Freescale with their smartbooks.

As in any battle for the ill-defined middle ground between PCs and smartphones, the various approaches also represent the attempts by different industry communities - cellphone makers, PC vendors and internet players - to dominate the mobile web.

Pichai said that, on 'cloudbooks' running Chrome OS, every application would be a web app so there would be no need to install or download software or manage updates. This would boost speed and battery life. In a demo running on a prototype Chrome OS platform, Pichai opened a Microsoft Excel file even though the machine did not have Excel installed. "Chrome OS does not have a proprietary application framework," Pichai said. "Anyone who puts an application on the web is writing an application for Chrome OS" (even Microsoft).

The open source project supporting Chrome OS is called Chromium OS and currently consists of code, user interface prototypes and some initial designs.

Despite the moves to concentrate web activity in the browser - or in plug-ins like Adobe Flash, which is evolving into a browser-within-a-browser - one of the big open source players, Mozilla, has no plans of its own for an operating system. "We're really focused on making the web the right platform of whatever operating system one is using. That's a fair amount of work," Mozilla Foundation chairman Mitchell Baker told Cnet. "I think we're going to continue to focus for quite awhile on the web itself as a platform and the capabilities of the web rather than build an operating system of our own and pull everybody into our world."

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