Present

Google has announced a new OS.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Specific details have not been released yet. But I’m fairly certain it will work togheter closely with other Google services (such as Gmail, Gdocs etc). It will actually be more of a browser, directly integrated with the hardware (so we can actually remove the traditional OS layer).

That would probably mean a lower resource usage. And if we think how much of our daily computer time is actually spent browsing the web, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Technology

Technical data is not available yet, but most probably we will have native Javascript support (it could be that the OS will be operated by Javascript). And there is a big chance that all the OS UI will be rendered using HTML and CSS (Webkit at the OS level?). The boundries between desktop and web are furthere diminished.

Future

This is indeed a great time to be working in the web industry. The web slowly moves into Clouds and into Personal Computers. Bridging them is ongoing (as we see with this OS).

For some time now i have been saying that the future OS will be the browser. It seems that i was right on the money with that prediction.

So hone your HTML, CSS and Javascript skills as they will play a huge part in tommorrows computer (and mobile) landscape.
Just think  that you could have widgets (or full blown programs) running at the OS level written as a jQuery plugin.