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@Velocio
I read the original article... it's kinda nuts.
The gist is that what was coined as the "operating system" on computers is what talks to the hardware and then allows applications to run.
The purpose of the "operating system" was to homogenise hardware so that one application could run on a variety of hardware. Your computer is not the same as mine, but the same application can run on both as we have the same "operating system" and that makes the application talk to the os, and the os takes care of talking to the hardware.
Some people strongly disagree with the idea that the "operating system" of the future could be a web browser, as they highlight that it doesn't talk to hardware it talks to an operating system, so it is just an application... but they totally miss the point that the applications that we are seeing emerge run inside a web browser. And, the homogenised platform in which applications are being developed for is no longer a operating system, the platform is now a web browser.
The full functionality of Google Docs, or Yahoo Maps... that stuff runs on computers of all operating systems and the common platform for making this happen is the browser.
In other words, Chrome by offering the full speed of the hardware to the applications has strengthened the platform for applications to run in. Chrome is abstracting the operating system out of the equation, application authors need only think of a browser to get the biggest audience possible, and no longer the operating system on a particular piece of hardware.
I don't think it will be too long before we start seeing thin clients become available that run a stripped down Linux invisibly in the background and that boot automatically into Chrome. Chrome will be, for all visible intents and purposes, the operating system.
The web browser is destined to be what people interact with, what developers work against, and the operating system of the future.
That does hit Microsoft, and it hits Apple. Chrome has shown that within a browser a scripted language can be compiled to run at the speed of native code, and that each tab within the browser can be given the same isolation and security as separate programs in an operating system... you get performance, and you get security and stability.
It is a big thing, and the naysayers who prematurely get pedantic and proclaim it isn't are going to look more than a little stupid in the future. By argument semantics that forget that the terms originally encapsulated ideas, and those ideas are now being re-implemented on a greater scale.