Google’s Chrome first announced in July, will be available within a week. Google had previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.

Driver support will probably be a weak point, but apparently Google has a legion of engineers working on building hardware drivers. Word is that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. In any event functioning drivers is important to Chrome OS’s success. Soon we will find out how well it works.

Supposedly Microsoft is working on a Google Chrome OS counter. This could be the Gazelle browser, which wants to treat the browser itself more like an OS. The Gazelle prototype supposedly will to do things like protect webapps from each other, and isolate different browser tabs (like Google Chrome does and Firefox is going to do).

It’s just one of many research projects Microsoft is working on, but it would make sense for them to unveil this one next week, to show that they’re not taking a backseat to Google. It won’t replace IE, at least not for awhile.