Google Thursday held a press conference at its Mountain View headquarters to unveil its forthcoming operating system - Chrome OS. Going by the details forwarded by Google, the company’s new platform for Web computing is essentially aimed at consumer netbooks, and does not have much to do with enterprise.

Being largely perceived as a prospective challenge to Microsoft’s Windows software, the Google Chrome OS is closely bound with Google’s Web browser, which is also incidentally called Chrome, running on an optimized Linux kernel.

Designed to be simple, yet swift and secure, the Chrome OS, which eliminates all local apps save for the browser, supports only solid-state storage. Further, except for the locally-cached user data, all other data will be stored in the cloud.

As such, the Chrome OS underlines Google’s approach that users’ data can also be stored servers across the Internet, rather than on the PC alone. In fact, the Chrome OS is not attempted to be an enhanced version of the Windows OS, but is a marked shift in the direction of the company’s perception in the sphere of “cloud computing.”

In a nutshell, the Google Chrome OS is basically a model which does not involve the installation of programs on a PC; rather, it involves the use of the programs over the Internet, to be accessed through a Web browser.