Google chairman Eric Schmidt has dismissed reports that the company will merge its Android and Chrome OS operating systems into one. Schmidt told attendees at Google’s Big Tent event in New Delhi, India, this week that both platforms will “remain separate for a very long time.”

Google Now, Google’s intelligent assistant that’s been wowing Android users since its introducing with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, is coming to the company’s Chrome web browser on Windows and Chrome OS.

Its move to desktops has been the subject of rumors and speculation for a while, but until the feature recently appeared in a Chrome beta release, there’s been little evidence to back it up.

Opera’s new web browser based on the WebKit rendering engine is now available in beta form for users with Android devices. The beta gives us a taste of Opera’s first WebKit browser, which comes after the company announced earlier this month that it will be dropping its own Presto rendering engine this year.

Google has developed its first touchscreen Chromebooks that will attempt to compete with the latest crop of notebooks powered by Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, sources for The Wall Street Journal have said. It’s unclear when the notebook will be available, or which company it’ll be made by — but it seems Google has plenty of work to do before they start hitting store shelves.

Opera has announced that it will gradually phase out the use of Presto, its own rendering engine, in favor of WebKit this year. It will utilize Chromium, the open source project from Google, which powers the search giant’s speedy Chrome browser. Opera’s first Chromium-based smartphone browser will be previewed at Mobile World Congress later this month.