Before recent fuss over the new Google Chrome browser, I was looking at another new freebie that may give the average user a better idea of where the search giant is headed. And it isn't even a Google product.

G OS 3.0 Gadgets is a Linux release, based on the pop/mainstream Ubuntu, that gives Google's various online strategies an opportunity to strut their stuff. It is designed for manufacturers of so-called netbooks, cheap small laptops like Asus EEE. When you're selling a PC for $350, you need a free operating system. For the rest of us, G OS can be downloaded (think gos.com) and run directly from a CD or thumb drive, or you can install direct to the hard drive.

The centerpiece of the release is access to online applications, mostly Google's, and the idea is you're not going to need much in the way of a disk drive for data or programs if they're lodged on a remote computer. Among the featured applications: Google Docs (word processing, spreadsheet, presentations); Google Gadgets (little mini-apps that float on your desktop, for example a clock, weather report, micro-slide show and various news feeds); Google Calendar, Skype telephony, and You Tube. It uses the Firefox browser.

So what's the big deal about all these programs? I mean, you can already run them out of your browser. Of course if you do that, as you surf, your current browsing session may displace your current work session and generally confuse what you're doing.

The first trick for a Web-based application is simple: Make it look like a program rather than a tab or window of a browser. The system for doing this was conjured up by the Firefox folks and is called Prism. It has the option of saving an online location not as a shortcut in the browser, but as a special type of link that opens a custom window that operates independently of the browser. You can permanently modify that window in the link to get rid of unnecessary displays and navigation controls. You can put this on your desktop, in your start menu, and in the case of G OS, in a navigation bar similar to Apple's Dock. (Google's Chrome has a similar function built in.) Not a huge breakthrough, but it does improve the usability of net apps a lot. I've since installed it on my PC via Chrome, and it does make life simpler, particularly for managing multiple online e-mail accounts.

The second problem with net-based applications: What if you don't have an Internet connection? That's been one of my gripes about my little Nokia 800 tablet PC when I'm out of Wi-Fi range, and besides being a problem for netbooks, it's an issue for smart phones that are to share data with a desktop PC via Internet apps. Google has another prototype that's been installed in GOS called Gears; it synchronizes the online directories of compatible Internet applications with data on your PC and other devices, and ultimately is supposed to allow those applications to run without any Internet. With a few exceptions, like Google word processing, that's a promise. In most cases, you can only view the synchronized data on your computer via the custom browser window, not modify it. If you want to work with the underlying data in, for example, Google spreadsheets, you'll need to load an application like the Open Office spreadsheet that also comes with the G OS.

You've probably heard talk about Google Chrome browser being aimed as a replacement for the Windows operating system. What we're really talking about is coming up with a stable browser to operate Gears and related technologies. That way, anyone can create a Gears-compatible online application, and should be able to run it, both over the net and directly on any computer, including Mac, PC or Linux. The nonproprietary nature of the Internet, in other words, will be available directly on your computer, too.

That sounds pretty good in theory, but we're really way too early in the process to figure out how well this will work in the real world, particularly when we're trying to use net-based applications to share the same data across PCs, netbooks, smart phones and PDAs.

The Docs word processor, for example, is quite usable offline. Disconnect from the net, and up pops an alert "editing in offline mode." You can keep working, and your changes are saved on your PC. When you reconnect to the net, they're uploaded to Google, and you're working on the remote copy again. Periodically it is synchronized with the local copy. Unfortunately, you still can't view Google calendar offline, nor can you work with your Google e-mail. The details of that kind of synchronization - which we've come to expect from our PDAs - is non-trivial.

Against this background, it makes a lot of sense for Google to have its own browser, even if eventually, as promised, it makes the technology freely available to others. Creating a framework for functional online/offline applications isn't something Google can contract out, or have done by a committee of volunteers in the usual open source model, in which the community at large may have other priorities.

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(Lou Dolinar writes a technology column for Newsday and hosts Lou's Day, "designed to help normal people unsnarl their computers," at www.dolinar.com. He can be reached at lou@dolinar.com.)