Earlier this week, Google released its first Internet browser. Dubbed Chrome, the project aimed to make web browsing safer, faster, and more stable for PC users around the world. But the revisions at the heart of the new software are so sweeping, some pundits are predicting it could revolutionize the way people use computers—leading potentially to a massive, worldwide sustainability increase in the process. 

 

"This is the potential threat that Microsoft has been worried about since the 1990s," Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, recently told ComputerWorld Magazine.  Ever since the widespread release of the first personal computers some 30 years ago, the business model has always involved selling people a machine that runs its own software internally. If people wanted to add new programs to their computer, they went out, bought new software, and installed it on their home machines.

The growing popularity of the Internet during the 1990s changed things slightly, allowing users to download new software and perform simple tasks online, but the box on your desk still had to do to nearly all the work itself. But with Chrome, continues Rosoff, “You've got Web apps running inside isolated processes. It really sounds a lot like Google trying to take the Web application model and make it more viable as a replacement for the desktop PC application model.”

The end result of this could be the opening of a market for cheaper, less powerful computers. With no massive operating systems, like Windows Vista or Mac OS X to house, and free media hosting resources, such as YouTube and Google Docs just a click away, the need for large, energy-sucking hard drives may be gone, replaced with a few flash memory chips to hold browser data. “Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system,” says TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington. 

While computers have greened up considerably since their vacuum-tube, room-filling days, their proliferation across the globe has made them a significant source of energy consumption and toxic materials. But by passing the burden of data storage and processing power—along with the massive energy bills they draw—onto corporations like Google, web applications can lessen computers’ impact while making green energy more viable. 

While a move to the web from the traditional system is likely at least several years away, the stir caused by Google Chrome will at the very least drive research into the arena. And with over a billion PCs in use worldwide, every reduction in power consumption, and every PC that no longer needs to ship with a set of operating system CDs, marks a tremendous cumulative gain in worldwide sustainability.