Midori

                                    The Operating Systems are about to enter their 4th generation with a revolutionary change ,as technology is lagging behind what consumers need. Conventional operating systems like Windows are woefully inadequate to support applications that span multiple devices let alone distribute tasks and data among those devices and with the cloud. Writing those types of applications also requires a break from the past. Microsoft’s current technologies are laying the groundwork for that break to occur. Midori is the code name for a managed code operating system being developed by Microsoft Research. Very little is known about Midori as it is still under development. Development started around 2006. It has been reported to be a possible commercial implementation of the Singularity operating system, a research project started in 2003 to build a highly-dependable operating system in which the kernel, device drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system and the growing prevalence of virtualization technologies, there will be a day when the Microsoft Windows client OS will become obsolete making way for a completely new OS.Microsoft seems to be preparing for that day with an incubation project code-named Midori, -A new OS that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived. Till now it’s in a state of incubation as InfoWorld's Randall C. Kennedy says “ Midori is a pipe dream at best”.
Midori is an operating system which will rely entirely on the Web and will integrate better with all the possibilities offered by the Network. Midori, according to the intentions, would be based on a two-tier system of kernels: the first, a microkernel, will manage the hardware, how threads are managed a multi-core CPUs and all the administration part and management of resources and consumption. The second will be instead on the management of applications and operating system features. Official listed features are:
 Full integration with GTK+ 2
 Fast rendering with Web Kit
 Tabs, windows and session management
 Flexibly configurable Web Search
 User scripts and user styles support
 Straightforward bookmark management
 Customizable and extensible interface
 Extension modules can be written in C
 Support HTML5 on Youtube
 Midori 0.1.6 passing the Acid3 Test
                                                     It will likely to give probably 10% better performance than Linux (significantly more on multi core) and 1/10th the security and reliability issues of the existing applications. It will also make maintaining or changing the operating system much cheaper and easier and reduce previous and future bloat by a significant margin ( due to a single large runtime/API) . Singularity is a new operating system being developed as a basis for more dependable system and application software. Singularity exploits advances in programming languages and tools to create an environment in which software is more likely to be built correctly, program behavior is easier to verify, and run-time failures can be contained. A key aspect of Singularity is an extension model based on Software-Isolated Processes (SIPs), which encapsulate pieces of an application or a system and provide information hiding, failure isolation, and strong interfaces.
                                                    So though there is no telling, at this point in time, where exactly Midori will end up but we might be seeing the end of Windows OS soon.