Hot on the heels of Google’s announcement that Gmail (and other Google applications) has finally emerged from beta comes a new bombshell: Google is fleshing out the Chrome browser to become a fully-fledged operating system. In the official Google blog, Google executives Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson laid out the strategy behind the new product. According to them, the OS will be fast, secure and designed to support Web applications.

I’m not really surprised by this news. People in the tech industry have gossiped about the possibility of a Google-powered operating system for a couple of years now. When Google Chrome debuted, several tech journalists pointed out that the browser wasn’t just fast — it worked well with other Google products like Gmail and Google Docs. In some ways, Chrome is already an operating system for Web-based applications. But it exists as an application running on top of another operating system like Linux, Windows or Mac OS.