Heh.
Gotta love the current s*storm brewing about whether "Chrome is an OS or not."
Look, i know full well that Chrome (or firefox for that matter) is not an official Operating System. There are no driver level elements that allow direct access to hardware for one thing, and the whole shebang rests on a huge number of mid level calls for most of the bit shuffling required. It's a bit like calling a sequence of command structures and variable references a "language".
No, what Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera and all the other modern browsers offer are a platform for development. They offer a means for standard access to local services and functions from both a remote and local execution point. They share a reasonably common "language" and set of functions (well, now at least, although i definitely see that not being the case in a year or two) that provide the ability to address a known set of capabilities.
In many respects, they have more in common with gaming consoles than operating systems.
If/When the "Cloud" truly becomes ubiquitous and all pervasive, where we can select from multiple redundant connections that are concurrent and always available, where we can live "on line" as easily as we can live off, then yes, these platforms will overshadow the systems they operate on much in the same way that Operating Systems currently abstract the fundamentals of hardware access do today. (When was the last time you had to peek at an interrupt return value to store a file?) We're not there yet. Not by a LONG shot, but i have faith that one day we will, and suddenly switching between your desktop, laptop, phone, GPS, tablet, Wii, PSP, and whatever bio-capable neural sync'd version of Headzilla Explorer 13.6 you've got implanted will be as transparent as moving your hands from one keyboard to another.
So, let's all calm down, breath normally, and repeat after me:
"Nobody knows what they're talking about."
"Nobody (yes, nobody) knows what they're talking about."
"Nobody (yes, that includes me and you) knows what they're talking about."
