On the last day of November, 2009, after the initial rush of excitement around Google's Chrome OS launch had quieted a bit, Ryan Paul and I sat down with Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, and Eitan Bencuya, from Google PR. I had done my best to sort out the why's and wherefore's of Google's first consumer OS effort in my initial launch coverage but I still had many questions about the past, present, and future of the project.

What followed that afternoon was an interview that was so candid, in-depth, and informative about not just Chrome OS, but about the present and future of the Web as a distributed application platform, that we chose to sit on the results until the holiday and CES madness had passed. So, in this brief pause between CES and the coming iSlate hysteria, we present our Chrome OS interview.

Over the course of the interview, Papakipos and Bencuya go into considerable detail about topics that range from big-picture perspectives on how Google develops software and where it sees the Web going with HTML5, to the nuts and bolts of what Chrome OS is slated to offer in specific areas. In short, we cover the following ground:

How and when the Chrome OS project was conceived

The relationship between Chrome OS and Android

How Google is trying to tackle the same "file handler" problem as Windows OLE and the registry, but in the cloud.

Who Google sees as the target audience for Chrome OS, how did they decide which projects and features to pursue

The convergence of the phone and the computer

Nuts and bolts details, like native client execution, security, and UI issues

The significance of Chrome's built-in media player

In the text below, the speakers should be obvious, but just in case you need it: JS is me (Jon Stokes), RP is Ryan Paul, MP is Matthew Papakipos, and EB is Eitan Bencuya.

How Chrome OS started, and where it's going

JS: I want to ask about the history of this. Did you know that this was something you wanted to do when you started at Google, or did you just slot into this [as an existing project]... did you cook up the idea?

MP: How open can I be about this Eitan?

EB: The way that we've thought about this for a while is if you read the Chrome OS blog post that we did in July, and you read the Chrome browser blog post that we did in September in 2008, they're very similar. They're essentially the same thing. And the reason is because when we were building Chrome the browser, we realized that everyone is spending their time online. So essentially we were trying to build something that mimics this operating system feel—there's a task manager in Chrome, and that was one of the early additions to Chrome.

So there's this trajectory where we kind of realized that this is the direction that we're going, but we didn't start coding and having engineers working on a Chrome OS until this year.

MP: Yeah, we didn't start coding until this year. But yeah, I sort of was thinking about it ever since I got here to Google two years ago. The crazy notion of "why doesn't Google go make a consumer operating system?" But I think most of us assumed it wouldn't happen for a bit longer. The interesting thing was that the market was ready for it faster than we expected. I think part of it is the shift to the Web has been going faster than we expected, but there are also some interesting developments that made it look ready even a year or two earlier than we expected.

Part of it is the netbook phenomenon—the fact that netbooks took off. If netbooks hadn't happened, and we were all still talking about laptops, I think we probably wouldn't be doing this yet. Part of what spurred it was people getting these really tiny portables and the fact that... well, [look at] their name, "netbook." I've been puzzling over that for a while, when I first started seeing them. Why are they called netbooks; there's nothing net-y about these; they're just laptops that are small. It's interesting that they got perceived from the beginning as being about the 'Net, and about the Web.

Your current computer is a somewhat unpleasant device: you put it on your lap, you sit on the couch, you start working, it starts burning your leg, you start running out of battery.

And I think part of it is just the way that people ended up using them. The people who were buying them were tending to use the browser for most of their apps, so people started calling them netbooks. But that made us realize that this was happening faster than we had thought.

When you buy a netbook, you don't really install Photoshop on it, or Outlook. It's too cheap—it's a $300 machine, [and] it doesn't make sense to go install expensive software on it... which is great software, but you don't go install Call of Duty 6 on it. It's not that kind of machine.

JS: Right. So the netbook proved the market for, not necessarily thin-client, but a sort of "svelte" client—a slimmed down...

MP: ... a lighter computer.

JS: Yeah.

MP: But it's still a real computer; just not the kind of thing that you're going to install major content creation applications on. Or sit down for a four-hour gaming session with your Call of Duty buddies.

But there's also other interesting stuff that's happened. Processors have gotten lower-power, so that the low-power processors are very cool. Both the x86 stuff and also the ARM stuff. And I personally have been surprised by how fast some of the ARM stuff has been happening; and that's one of the other things that got us really excited about netbooks—the prospect of really low-power computers.

Your current computer is a somewhat unpleasant device: you put it on your lap, you sit on the couch, you start working, it starts burning your leg, you start running out of battery. Some of the new low-power ones really last for 8 to 10 hours on a charge, and some of them don't have fans. They're really cool, quiet machines that last for a long time, which is actually what you'd like your laptop to be, right? It's kind of a bummer that today, your laptop really is a two-and-half hour computer. You sit down, you do two hours of work and are like, "Ah, it's gonna crater," so you bring it back to your desk and plug it in, and you're like, "Now I don't have a laptop anymore." So then you find yourself sitting at your desk, working on your laptop, which is pretty lame.

JS: Well, a lot of us have gone laptop-only. I actually went MacBook Air-only, from a 15" MacBook, and I can plug this into my 30" monitor and have all the screen real-estate that I need. But I only do that if I have to mess with a spreadsheet or something.

MP: But the other thing is that you find yourself forced to do it, right? Just because you're using it somewhere else for the convenience, but then you have to plug in, and you're like, "I might as well sit at my desk and plug it all into everything, in that case."

EB: And you carry around your charger cord, and that adds weight to your bag.

MP: Yeah, I was laughing at that over the weekend, because I was showing my dad one of these [Chrome OS portables], and I said, "Can you grab that one from the other room," so he brought it and the charger in. And I said, "Dad, it's a netbook... you don't need the charger" [laughs]. But it's so funny that that's reflexive, and people assume it won't last very long without the charger.