Chrome OS is on schedule, says Eric Schmidt at Abu Dhabi Media Summit

Yesterday at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit on Yas Island Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the development of Google’s Chrome operating system is on schedule and that it would be the big topic in the news during the second half of this year.

Chrome is of course a web browser from Google but almost a year ago they introduced plans to develop an operating system with the same name.

The Chrome OS is expected to be lightweight and run only a web browser. It’s target market would be netbooks and other similarly underpowered devices on which users mostly browse the web, chat on instant messaging and other Internet-related tasks. The idea is that those sorts of computers don’t need a fully-featured operating system and users would do better with a more streamlined operating system.

Although Windows 7 has been adopted at a fast rate on netbooks since it’s release in October 2009, many manufacturers still sell netbooks with Windows XP.

Schmidt said in Abu Dhabi that Crome OS is on track for a release during the second half of this year. Clearly, Chrome OS is something that he is very excited about and since it’s being developed by Internet-giant Google we can be sure it’s going to have a significant impact once released.