First and foremost, the Chrome OS design team is obsessed about speed, noted Group Product Manager Caesar Sengupta and Engineering Director Matt Papakipos.

"We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations, and running everything possible in parallel," Sengupta and Papakipos said. "This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds."

Improving the User Experience

Though Chrome OS still has a long way to go before all its specs are finalized, Google is already showing off some of the features it has in mind. To minimize the amount of screen space devoted to the Chrome OS, the system's user-interface window is expected to combine apps and standard web pages into a tab strip at the top of the screen.

Called the apps menu, the primary OS access point will provide ready access to frequently used web apps and tools featuring desktop functionality. Moreover, individual apps will open in tabs along the strip.

"Within these application tabs, most things behave the same way as they do in Chrome today," said Google spokesperson Glen Murphy.

Some secondary apps will open in small overlays that Google calls panels. Designed to handle specific functions, such as chat and music players, the panels will float on top of other open applications. Or if the user prefers, they can be docked to a bar at the bottom of the screen or placed in a sidebar. Additionally, Google may offer a split-screen mode that will enable users to view two different content selections side by side.

No Worries Data Backup

Every time users log in to their machines, they will be able to immediately resume any previous sessions. All the tabs that were open last time will be right there on the screen -- just like what happens now in the Chrome web browser.

Google's obsession with speed also extends to the metal, Papakipos noted. "We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS," he said. "It's a lean and mean OS that runs on the web very well."

With Chrome OS, all the apps -- together with all the content that users create -- will reside in the cloud and not on the machine. As a result, users will no longer have to worry about things like hard-drive maintenance, carrying a USB key, or making frequent data backups. Moreover, their cloud-based personal data will be fully encrypted.

Though outages do occur at cloud-based sites, Windows-based machines also are prone to outages due to system crashes, hard-disk failures, and other events that are eliminated by the radical change in design that Chrome OS implements.

"I think the cloud will compare very favorably to what users have today," said Google Vice President Sundar Pichai. "The user's e-mail is already stored in the cloud."