Are These Screenshots of Google Chrome OS?

The internet is no stranger to photoshopped fakes, so it comes as no surprise that pictures of Google Chrome OS have been popping up frequently, only to be confirmed as fakes. Recently, the most plausible pictures yet of Chrome OS have appeared and the question is already out there: Are they real?

Google Chrome OS is supposed to be an ultra light operating system for netbooks and internet tablets because it’s designed to do one thing really well: access the internet. This may sound like too big of a limitation to some, but in today’s world of online computing and the ever-increasing size of the Cloud, most people don’t need any software that isn’t already available as a web application.

So it should come as no surprise that the image in question just shows a web browser window. However, there are a few discrepancies that make us a little leery of calling this real. First of all, why on earth are those icons on the right dock so large? Seems a little unusual for an OS, unless it’s designed for denizens of an old folks home.

The folks at TechCrunch feel the appearance of Picasa and Google Earth icons on the dock are dubious because those are downloadable clients. However, I don’t find their appearance that unusual. It would not surprise me that Google would bake some of the code for their popular offerings into the OS so that you could access those sites without downloading anything.

So the final verdict? It’s a maybe, verging on likely, but we’ll have to wait for something more concrete from Google.

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