Introducing the Google Chrome OS

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

by mqt • 17 years ago

370 167 17 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

mcav• 17 years ago

Key Data Point:

> The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

tc4• 17 years ago

If their approach to Android is any guide, much of the work will consist of eliminating any GNU or GPL components from the (userspace) runtime environment.

cdibona2• 17 years ago

This denies that Android runs on top of Linux, which is licensed under the gpl. Or that the Google search appliance runs on a ton of gpl'd code, all mirrored off of code.google.com...

Kadin• 17 years ago

Why would anyone spend time eliminating GPL code in the userland of a system that runs on a GPL kernel and subsystems?

I'm not denying that they're doing it or anything, I just can't imagine why they'd bother.

blasdel6• 17 years ago

Quit modding the poor guy down. See these two initial explorations from a core Linux plumber:

Android: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/100221.html

Palm Pre: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/111453.html

"...overall the Pre has the appearance of being a well-engineered distribution. It's recognisably Linux in a way the Android isn't."

davidw2• 17 years ago

Yeah, they definitely prefer the Apache license, but the "userspace" in Android mostly consists of Dalvik and a bunch of stuff written for it/on top of it. Since they're trying to save space, they went with a smaller libc and don't include much at all in the way of 'standard unix tools'.

In other words I don't think they care too much about gpl stuff since they built their own UI and bytecode interpreter where most of the action is anyway...

modeless• 17 years ago

Webkit is LGPL, Chrome is based on Webkit, and the entire OS is built around Chrome. It's also speculated that their "new window system" is built on DirectFB which is LGPL.

markbao3• 17 years ago

I wonder if people will be able to take this new windowing system and use it for their own purposes. That would be fantastic, if the new windowing system is good.

andreyf• 17 years ago

Yes, as soon as it becomes open source later in the year. I'm not sure how fantastic it would be, considering it would be Yet Another Windows System which only runs on these netbooks.

Instead, I'd be really impressed witha good windowing systems impemented using the canvas tag, something like:

http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/

access_denied4• 17 years ago

If it frees us from X, that would be an improvement - I am holding my breath.

thristian• 17 years ago

No doubt it will be a windowing system optimized for showing exactly one full-screen "window", and perhaps occasional modal dialogs.

I believe both Qt and GTK+ can be compiled to draw directly to the Linux framebuffer, if you don't want to use X (although they don't exactly provide much in the way of window management).

cmars232• 17 years ago

Much anticipating that "new windowing system". If you wonder why Linux has never claimed the desktop, look no further than X.

bendotc• 17 years ago

I'd be interested in hearing your reasoning on that one. Lots of people complain about X in various ways, and while a couple years ago I would've agreed, these days, I'm no longer entering my monitor's vertical refresh rate manually, and X is pretty transparent to me.

And on the up side, it's nice to be able to run a GUI app remotely, though I'll agree that that's not winning over too many desktop users.

Oompa• 17 years ago

A browser is one thing. But an OS? I have my doubts.

Xichekolas3• 17 years ago

Why? People surely said the same thing about Linus at one point.

seldo2• 17 years ago

You have to re-think what is meant by an "operating system".

What is Windows? It's that thing, in the background, that lets you run all the applications you want to run.

But what if all your applications were written in Javascript and HTML, and had URLs instead of .exe files? With all the extra power built into Chrome, they could still write to file systems, store data, work offline, do sophisticated graphics and parallel processing -- these are not hypotheticals, this is what Chrome can do right now. We're just beginning to scratch the surface of what an app written from Chrome can do.

Chrome can be an OS, for some value of "OS".

msie• 17 years ago

If they depend on Javascript as an applications language then I hope they add goto to the language. At least that's what another HN discussion has led me to believe.

sovande• 17 years ago

When the iphone was first released, development was going to be via javascript and safari. That didn't go too well with neither users nor developers. Isn't this going to be the same thing? And for the so called windowing system I would not hold my breath and except anything like quartz. Its probably going to be just enough framebuffer code to drop X11 so the browser window can run in fullscreen. The window manager will then be implemented in javascript. Wee!

wmf• 17 years ago

I suspect that Google is not so much developing an OS as taking a Linux distro and removing the parts that aren't necessary to run Chrome.

ptomato• 17 years ago

You're forgetting, though, that it is an OS that (appears) to consist solely of an environment to boot a browser as rapidly as possible. And, really, it consists more of linux kernel modified for rapid boot, probably optimized for low battery usage etc. They are not building an entire OS.

shiranaihito• 17 years ago

This is what it sounds like.

I'm reminded of the time when Chrome came out and Arrington flipped: "z0mg it's a cloud operating system!1! the future is here!"

jeffspost• 17 years ago

Interesting. The one missing piece--a RAD development environment that's as efficient as Visual Studio is at producing fat clients. The business world will only embrace the webcentric model when it becomes as efficient to code in as .net click-once fat clients. The idea of simple, cheap, rugged hardware is very appealing. But programmer time is the #1 cost--businesses go for easy drag/drop fat client apps. Software written for 5 users has to be thrown together pretty fast or it never pays back...

Adrenalist2• 17 years ago

Can you clarify your statements a bit more?

I don't think that Google Chrome OS would be suitable for most corporate shops that are generally Microsoft centric (and have been for quite some time). I think this free OS will be geared towards light users that primarily use their computer for surfing the web and checking their email.

_cbsz3• 17 years ago

RAD = rapid application development, the business term for "drag-n-drop GUI builders" that we all know and hate. Not having one for the Web is a valid criticism, but if GWT can handle Swing API input then we DO have one.

10ren5• 17 years ago

Being Microsoft-centric, in itself, is inertia - it can change if there is a sufficiently superior alternative in terms of businesses' actual needs. Google OS can start off in low-end markets (like Toyota did...), and then move up.

jeffspost notes a startup opportunity: webapps for creating webapps (actually webapp clients, but that's less memorable)

die_sekte• 17 years ago

The answer to your problem: 280atlas.com – if they ever release it.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

Huh?

They don't need application vendors to target Chrome OS in order for this to be a success - the whole point is that it just runs web apps, period.

Its targeted at consumers and netbooks, not those that want to run heavy duty, CPU-intensive applications. The whole idea of a netbook is to be small, light, quick, and primary a web browsing device.

kylec• 17 years ago

Let's hope this also means that a Linux version of Chrome is around the corner.

tc4• 17 years ago

Since they say they're implementing a new windowing environment for this project, there may not be a lot of porting overlap between Chrome for Chrome OS and Chrome for your normal Linux distribution.

_cbsz3• 17 years ago

It would have to be Windowsy, unless Chrome has its own internal windowing layer that's a suitable general abstraction.

I assumed that "windowing environment" meant "window manager" not "GUI toolkit" anyway.

aita• 17 years ago

They should have bought plan9.

cdibona2• 17 years ago

If you haven't tried out the chromium nightly desktop builds, they're actually quite nice. The team is still nailing down the plugins, but the browser itself is wicked fast and pretty stable (given its alpha nature)

buugs• 17 years ago

I think stable for a web browser these days requires flash/java support, I don't know if this has been fixed or not in the builds though. Probably less on the java side and more on the flash.

markbao3• 17 years ago

If you're a Mac user, you can also download the latest nightly build here:

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-ma... (scroll all the way down to the latest build directory)

And yes, it is wicked fast. On my system, it doesn't even bounce in the dock before opening. It just opens. Plugins aren't supported yet, but I just open any sites that require Flash in Safari.

trezor2• 17 years ago

Even for a minimalistic web-browser Chromium is still rather lacking. While what used to be butt ugly font-rendering has gotten better, at least to the point of readable, as far as I can tell there is still no plugin support.

The only way you can fully configure the browser is still trough running gconf-editor for some parts, and configuring Firefox and then importing settings from there.

That being said, my biggest issue with the current chromium builds is that performance is truly horrible and majorly unstable. Sometimes things just works, snappy, as expected. But in more than 50% of the cases when opening a new page the entire browser locks, for what can be periods of up to 5 to 10 seconds. Wasn't process isolation supposed to fix this?

If this browser is going to be the "OS" for the web, in it's current state its closest equivalent would be Windows 3.11.

IMO Firefox 3.5 is a much better browser, while peak performance being somewhat slower, at least it performs predictably.

10ren5• 17 years ago

Chrome wasn't built in a day.

Though you'd think if they're announcing a linux-based operating system, centered on their web-browser, making their web-browser run on linux would be trivial. OTOH, could it be the diversity of linux distributions that's making it difficult for them?

rythie3• 17 years ago

I don't get the impression that is actually a significant problem for anyone. Most distributions include the same libraries, recent kernels with similar options and even put things in similar places. Packaging is the major difference - though that's a job best left to the distributions anyway.

icefox• 17 years ago

They have been working on the linux port for only 9 months porting what was essentially a native windows application written in Visual Studio. The fact that they got this far this fast shows that they have a pretty good team.

dcurtis2• 17 years ago

I'm glad Google has identified a need for something like this, but I don't really trust that Google has the right talent to build an operating system. They have serious problems with user experience and interface design (see: Doug Bowman). The mere idea that they are attempting to encroach on an aspect of experience as large as the operating system is to me somewhat scary.

I do hope they prove me wrong. But based on their past performance, I am not holding my breath.

Also: Google, if you're reading this, please at least make the typography render properly in this OS. You've already failed at this with Chrome, which has some of the worst antialiasing I have seen in a browser (surpassed in crappiness only by IE).

seldo2• 17 years ago

As I said below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693339): you've not got what they're thinking of as the OS. The browser is the operating system, and the apps are all web apps. The core of the OS is Linux, but the interface is all browser -- you don't install apps, you just type in their URL. There's hardly any OS UI they need to invent that we haven't already seen as part of Chrome itself.

dcurtis2• 17 years ago

Not really. You still have to be able to log in, store data, set up parental controls, deal with power management and screen savers and wifi networks, choose desktop backgrounds (assuming they don't force you to use a single tabbed window), choose keyboard/language/sticky keys, define trackpad gestures, accessibility settings, etc...

I am curious to see how they deal with this stuff.

Xichekolas3• 17 years ago

I couldn't help thinking about the crunchpad when I read this.

Slap this on a tablet with a hybrid display and you might have something very interesting.

david927• 17 years ago

I thought the same thing. For my desktop, I don't see why I would replace Ubuntu with this, but this is exactly what the crunchpad needs. Great news.

greyman• 17 years ago

Yes, that would be a perfect device for it. Because, when we talk about netbooks, I am not so sure I'd like to have Chrome OS on it. Ok, it would boot faster and maybe also run slightly faster, but the boot time isn't that much of a concern for me. On the other hand, I have a half dozen windows apps I want to run on it, since I don't live on the Internet only.

skorgu3• 17 years ago

Slap a Pixel Qi [1] screen and a capacitive (iPhone) touchscreen on a Crunchpad and I at least will line up for one.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawX3wenxNc&feature=relat...

jcl• 17 years ago

I thought it already was planned to be capacitive: http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/10/crunchpad.apr....

netsp3• 17 years ago

For application developers, the web is the platform.... Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.

Does this mean an operating system that runs chrome and little else or an operating system that runs mostly chrome?

eelco• 17 years ago

I think this is great. Most people don't know what a browser is anyway, so for them it probably won't make much of a difference. It will be interesting to see how much of an OS you can strip away.

dryicerx• 17 years ago

So effectively your PC becomes a Google ThinClient.

Got all the Office Applications with Google Apps. Email/Communication with Gmail. The rest of the web. Multimedia with YouTube/Hulu/etc. Sounds like what majority of the people need. Even for work environments, would be pretty good (you can offer your proprietary application in the form of a web application).

derefr2• 17 years ago

I'd enjoy replacing the "instant-on OS" partition on my notebook with this.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

What I want is a good enough "instant-on" that it's my only partition, and I no longer have to worry about hibernation or sleep mode ever again. Have orthogonal persistence for everything, so I never even have to save. Just open the clamshell, or hit the on button. Something comes along to distract me, I snap it shut, take care of whatever it is, then open it up again, wait a half second and continue on where I left off.

The ideal laptop/internet pad would behave like the Nintendo DS, if the DS could hibernate, and not just sleep when you close it.

skorgu3• 17 years ago

Add NaCl for heavier apps and a NaCl'd VDI or similar client and there's really nothing you can't theoretically do given enough bandwidth.

blinks• 17 years ago

It goes beyond even that, with some sweet tech coming out:

http://vimeo.com/5404358

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

Interesting, I had seen OnLive (http://www.onlive.com/) but not this one (http://www.gaikai.com/).

So who copied who?

chaosprophet3• 17 years ago

I personally would never trust google with something as important and all encompassing as my OS. I value my privacy far too much for that, and seeing as how google collects usage data for just about every action you perform on services they offer, I'm not sure i'll ever go the google way on desktop software.

samg2• 17 years ago

Google knows who my friends are (Contacts), what I'm saying to them (Gchat/Gmail), where I'm going (Gmaps), what I'm reading (Reader), what I'm writing (Docs) and what I'm looking for (Search).

As far as I'm concerned, operating systems are pretty interchangeable. The things I care about are already all going through Google. Does anyone besides Google offer a similar suite of apps? The only one I can think of is Apple's MobileMe.

chaosprophet3• 17 years ago

How about Outlook/Thunderbird/Facebook (contacts) + Yahoo (mail) + OpenStreetMap (maps) + Sage/Friendfeed (RSS) + Zoho (Docs) + Bing (Search)?

While no-one may be offering a similar suite of applications, if you want to use them you can find different services that do.

Also currently even if google does know all that information about you, it doesn't know what files you have on your hard drive. In my opinion, giving carte blanche on data on my hard drives to google is a big no for a company that doesn't give two hoots about the privacy of their users.

Elepsis• 17 years ago

Sure: Microsoft with Windows Live and Bing.

Microsoft knows who my friends are (Messenger/profile), what I'm saying to them (Messenger), where I'm going (Bing Maps), what I'm writing (Office Live), and what I'm looking for (Bing). Granted Office Live is a beta and there is no Microsoft-branded online feed reader. But a lot of the checklist is covered.

If you start checking off every box, you'll find that Yahoo has a fairly similar total suite of properties, too. Google just has the most mind share.

btw0• 17 years ago

I wonder if there is possibility their new window system is going to replace the bloated X window system in other distributions.

blasdel6• 17 years ago

They have one of the best chances to pull it off out of all the attempts over the last 25 years.

I really hope they try to go big -- bury ALSA cleanly, use Skia for all drawing as vectors, and have an event model intended for Cocoa/WPF/GTK# (not the crapulence of Xt).

tvon2• 17 years ago

The barrier to replacing X is not replacing X, it is the significant rewriting of software that uses X.

blasdel6• 17 years ago

And the first massive hump there is getting the replacement good enough to even bother thinking about rewrites.

Google has a chance to leap past that, because they've contrived a situation where they not only don't need X, they don't need to port X apps.

Raphael_Amiard• 17 years ago

Wich is not necessarily a problem since they seem to be aiming for a minimal local software stack.

limmeau• 17 years ago

... and porting or rewriting the device drivers.

ntoshev• 17 years ago

I can't wait to try an actual version of this in a virtualbox. Betas should be available for geeks way before the netbook manufacturers get to installing it on their devices in 2010.

timothychung• 17 years ago

I hope someone will wrap it as an application on Windows.

That would be fantastic to have a OS to handle all web related activities for general users.

10ren5• 17 years ago

we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google

This is the kind of competition that I would like to enjoy (i.e. between products that both belong to me). I wonder if it actually will work out for them, and if so, how I could use that strategy myself.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

Some may remember the Forbes ASAP article, excerpted from Gilder's book, touted with the cover, "George Gilder Thinks This Kid Can Topple Bill Gates":

http://www.gilder.com/public/telecosm_series/software.html

It's taken 14 long years -- and it's Google-Chrome-plus-Javascript rather than Netscape-Navigator-plus-HotJava -- but the browser has finally become a complete alternative to a desktop OS.

The article's final sentence: "In the age of the hollowed-out computer, the king of the desktop rules an emigrating empire."

gaius• 17 years ago

The only way Google can make good on their promises of it just working, being virus free etc, is if they lock it down more than Apple did the iPhone.

General purpose computing device, or a Google Terminal? That's your choice.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

What if one device has a switch on the side: 'locked-down terminal' or 'open general purpose computer'? And via virtualization, the two sides are sealed from each other, but instantly switchable? Why not the best of both worlds?

huherto• 17 years ago

It didn't happen before because MS was able to defend its position. (e.g. Positioning IE, crippling java, etc)

gasull• 17 years ago

I wonder if Chrome OS is the same as, or a derivative of, Goobuntu:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Goobuntu

blasdel6• 17 years ago

I wonder just how Google Native Client will fit into this, especially extended with things like USB support and OpenGL.

There's games, obviously, but what about a NaCL port of iTunes? It's not that far-fetched.

niktechx2• 17 years ago

Google has already indirectly "extended" Native Client with native 3D graphics using their O3D API (http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/). It's just a matter of time until someone codes up a library to expose that API through JS interop in Native Client.

I think we can expect very close integration of Native Client into the Chrome OS as soon as or right after it goes public. To the level of accessing hardware ports to control external devices right from your Native Client web-app.

Imagine drivers that get loaded and updated on-the-fly. Of course, Google will have to implement a smart security mechanism (along the lines of RSA authentication for dynamic device/driver coupling) and provide a way for device manufacturers to register their driver's public keys with Chrome OS.

Raphael• 17 years ago

But will Native Client work on ARM?

Jem2• 17 years ago

I've an AA1 running Linpus, which is buggy and slower than I anticipated. It's bloated down with superfluous software that I don't need, and that you have to follow a series of complex guides to remove. (Even then you risk screwing up parts of Linpus which are dependant on it.)

All I use it for is browsing and light coding on the move. Windows, and the likes of Ubuntu Netbook Remix are all too 'big' for that.

It sounds like the Google Chrome OS is exactly what my netbook needs.

mooism22• 17 years ago

I get the impression that the only native application it will run is Chrome. So how are you going to edit your source code, push/pull your changes, test it, run it?

I've seen web-based ssh clients, and someone might be able to write a web-based vnc / remote desktop client, but I can't see it being useful for offline coding.

Jem2• 17 years ago

You're grossly over-complicating my needs.

None of my websites (that I would edit on the netbook) are business critical / make money / have any real world importance whatsoever. I can log in via cpanel, roll out some coding amends live and worry about breaking things as and when it happens.

koepked2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure if I like implications of a web-centric OS, especially when its producer is as rich and powerful as Google. I see the market for it, and I think it will be a huge benefit for the average user. However, I see the transition from desktop-based software to web-based as a loss of user control. Today, when governments decide that mp3 sharing, porn, articles of political dissent, or news from non-national sources should be eliminated, they quickly realize, if they don’t already know, that elimination is impossible, because no agency can track down and deal with every user who has decided to install software allowing him/her to do these things. When software moves to the web, I think it will likely end up existing on the servers of one of an oligopoly of computing providers, who will be much easier to influence because of their small number, and because they will have no choice but to abide by legislation if they wish to remain in business.

This may not seem like an issue right now, because there is still choice. But with Google pushing a web-centric OS, I think within a decade, many people will have a hard time choosing something else, much the same way they had a hard time choosing something other than windows until the last five years.

Maybe I’m just a Big Brother fearing nut, but I don’t like where we’re heading.

mooneater• 17 years ago

Agreed, this is just too convenient for, say, the Chinese govt. (as just one example).

trickjarrett2• 17 years ago

I concur. I've become more and more aware of the looming Google benevolent giant, but one day that giant's going to get angry and by that point it may be too late.

That being said, I still use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Analytics, and other services. So I'm not exactly avoiding the apocalypse here.

bjelkeman-again• 17 years ago

What I think is interesting is that having a hard time choosing something other than Windows may have been quite benevolent in comparison with a Google-situation which turns ugly. What if there is an organisation that has all your email, all your documents, all your appointments and all your conversations and can follow the majority of your surfing via ads. What if this resource suddenly is too tempting to keep hands away from for "fighting terrorism" or something such.

Being forced to use Windows at work could be considered nice in comparison.

I don't think that anyone at Google set out to be evil. But power corrupts and the legal systems and governments have not exactly struck up a fight for privacy for the individual the last couple of years.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

I don't think this is a matter of 'if' but 'when'.

Already governments are openly leaning on google to get it to do their bidding, who knows what is happening behind the scenes.

jsz02• 17 years ago

As long as Google doesn't do anything to limit my access to competitors or otherwise punish me for opting out of a Google service then I am not concerned at all.

kilowatt• 17 years ago

Can I call alarmist bullshit?

I think the inevitable consequence of fears like yours is that you'll be able to pay different institutions, so that you can store part of your data here, and part of your data there. So that you can surf behind company A's proxy most of the time but use company B's when you feel like/need to.

Yes, there are going to be less entities on the whole. But if the internet keeps growing, that might be a temporary setback--the infrastructure is going to hopefully become more spread out, more resilient to attack, and more designed to protect individual rights, and individual property. Think about it this way: as we move more and more pieces of our lives online, the value of our digital "stuff" grows higher and higher, and systems to protect that stuff, and our hopefully our constitutional rights (including the right to privacy), will appear.

At the very worst, you can always wait for some kind of massive privacy or fiscal (or even just data loss) tragedy would at least cause governments to act quickly to more clearly define the rights of an individual online :p

aik• 17 years ago

I agree that we have different options. We don't HAVE to choose Google, just as we didn't have to choose Windows; it was just the easiest/most convenient/accessible/popular way to go and so most people do it. Also, I'm sure more systems will be created that are designed to protect our data, as you say, though all you're doing is putting your trust in Corporation B over Corporation A.

Constitutional rights? Right to privacy? The government can listen in on any phone conversation they want (wire, cell, voip...), read any e-mail that gets sent, break into your home if they would like, et cetera. What rights do we have exactly?

Power corrupts. It's human nature. Your trust in the government to not abuse its' power is scary to me.

socratees• 17 years ago

Maybe Google should enable the users to save their data to whichever place they wish. And the web OS, or the authorities who're running it should never have access to users data. The OS should just be the communication interface. Maybe this is utopian, but i guess its the right way to go from here.

calcnerd256• 17 years ago

The FUD is strong with this one. If you want to run your own apps, run your own server. Those who don't care will use the public cloud. Nobody controls the whole Web, and as long as your ISP is reasonable (which none are), hosting your own private app is still possible.

blacktastic• 17 years ago

When we create new software that benefits from lots of networked users, we will be forced to make that software compatible with the people who do not have their own private servers. So users can run their own servers, but there will be those who cannot afford to do so or do not have the expertise. If there are enough of those kinds of users we will then have to bend to the needs of those users who in turn bend to the rules of the companies hosting their software.

colins_pride• 17 years ago

But what if there are web-centric OSes and desktop-centric OSes?

In a world where the OS market is fragmented, centralized control and opression becomes even more difficult than it was in a desktop-centric world where one OS had huge market share.

Now that's not the case if we end up with one web-centric OS, but I don't see that happening any more than I see Bing taking over 65% of the search market without any response from Google.

s-phi-nl2• 17 years ago

It is interesting that this, the top rated reply, is not about "With what will this compete?" but "How will this kill competition?"

Micand• 17 years ago

If ARM and x86 are targeted, this means no Flash (not surprising, given how poorly it runs on Linux), which presumably means YouTube will be operating in full-on HTML 5 video mode by the time these devices launch.

If netbooks continue their meteoric ascent, and if Chrome OS grabs a significant share of the market, we may finally see the realization of the mythical Year of Linux On the Desktop. The ironic aspect, of course, is that even though a large number of non-technical users will finally be running on a fully open-source platform, they will use it to run applications whose workings are even more opaque than traditional closed-source, client-side apps.

I wonder what role, if any, Native Client will play on these devices. I understand Native Client to target only x86, but I find it difficult to imagine Chrome OS -- Google's first direct challenge to Windows -- not being able to run Native Client applications.

access_denied4• 17 years ago

I enjoyed your narrative.

sahaj• 17 years ago

i agree with you. the comment with the large number of votes is a fearmongering comment, while the comment that you are referring to is actually a technical comment (the kind that i think is more relevant at HN).

access_denied4• 17 years ago

My above comment "I enjoyed your narrative." is meant in a sinceren and non-cynical, non-subtext-whatsoever, non-ironic way. I wrote it to express a bit of appreciation towards Micand for crafting his imho good summary on the topic.

Can anyone explain to me, what is worth downvoting about it? Thanks.

rythie3• 17 years ago

Flash has a few small problems on Linux, but generally is usable.

cpach• 17 years ago

While it's not unusable, the performance issues are not trivial. At least on slower CPU:s.

blasdel6• 17 years ago

Problems like crashing my browsers 10x a week, and using 50x the CPU that mplayer uses to play the same video.

ZeroGravitas3• 17 years ago

Adobe are working on full Flash 10 for ARM-based linux on netbooks and smartphone platforms, due for next year.

Whether Google wants or needs it is another question.

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

Too little, too late.

We will never forget.

roc• 17 years ago

Given the way that Flash performs on OSX I don't see any reason to think their ARM port will be at all acceptable.

skorgu3• 17 years ago

Linux making it to the desktop by essentially ignoring the Desktop paradigm? Oh the irony.

s-phi-nl2• 17 years ago

I wonder if this has been part of the rise of Linux on the desktop for the last year or two.

aussie_bob• 17 years ago

OS 2008 (Maemo Linux on Nokia N8XX tablets) has a port of Flash 9 running on ARM. I doubt it'll take much to get a new version out for Google.

rms• 17 years ago

Checkmate.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

Im convinced it's not a coincidence that this week they also announced dropping a load of beta tags, hid the free apps sign up page a little more and made a number of other tweaks.

I get the impression they are trying to repackage their cloud services together: it would make sense if the plan for Chrome OS is to ultimately tie it all together.

samuel• 17 years ago

Is this a response to bing? If you go after my market, I'll go after yours.

It's not only the Chrome OS thing. Google Apps out of beta could mean that Google is serious about competing in the groupware segment.

tybris• 17 years ago

Just another Linux distribution.

If they want to do something useful, make me a command-line that supports images, links, etc and gives me an easy way to process XML.

ananthrk• 17 years ago

It is also interesting to think about this news in the context of FaceBook buying Parakey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parakey), though it is a web-based OS. IMO, given Google's array of applications, they are better suited to write a web-centric OS than FaceBook.

Goladus• 17 years ago

I switched back to Firefox for security reasons and because Chrome turned out to be really slow re-rendering tabs that haven't been visited for awhile. Not too enthused about a whole OS but I suppose that might be one answer to the security problems.

billpg2• 17 years ago

I could develop a new netbook OS over a weekend.

(Joke. Please don't downvote me again, I'm already at -5.)

netsp3• 17 years ago

promise to be good?

billpg2• 17 years ago

But I though that "Mel" sounded "ghastly". Shirley that's unforgivable? :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679208

yankeeracer73• 17 years ago

I don't see that anyone has mentioned Apple in any of this. They certainly aren't just going to roll over and let Google take this entire space. They will launch a netbook at some point with the iPhone OS, some storage, the app store to get everything you want, a superior user experience and industrial design, and oh yeah, the browser to also run all these other apps...And it will be this kind of weird hybrid old model vs. new all over again.

Derrek• 17 years ago

Does anyone have any guesses on how this might be different from Android?

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

See the comments about Android in the Google Blog post.

Android: Aimed at small-screen, low-power devices (handhelds, set-top boxes, MIDs, netbooks). Java-based application development. Touchscreen-oriented UI.

Chrome OS: Aimed at netbooks, laptops, desktops. Web-based application development. Browser-based UI.

alessandro• 17 years ago

I think Google will continue to "win" and we will use their applications/reader/ecc until they will have the dominant search engine. If you look at what they offer (with the exception, maybe, of excel-like webapp), they are not killer application. We are using them because our online-life is Google-centric. So we should remeber that everything else they do is buld on their search engine dominance (think to the omnibox)... For the webos is the same. It's fine, for a netbook IF Google will remain Google.

If you look at what people do with a Mac, they do far more than just using web application. Far Far more.

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

Yet another Unix clone. Yawn.

grellas• 17 years ago

The key to supremacy in the enterprise market is to seize control of the entry point.

IBM did it in the 1960s and 1970s with the entry point being a highly skilled personalized sales force in an era where relationships established the trust needed for enterprises to commit to large systems.

Microsoft did it in the 1980s and 1990s with the entry point being its proprietary API for its desktop OS which, with the help of OEM hardware partners, it used to choke out anyone who sought to compete with it in the desktop applications market. It then tried (and failed) to use its desktop monopoly as a vehicle by which to dominate the back-end of enterprise computing.

Google now seeks to gain similar supremacy with the entry point being superior proprietary products ultimately derived from or at least capitalizing upon Open Source in a web-centric computing environment. What form this will take, I don't know. But it will take a form by which Google tries to seize and maintain control of the entry point and ultimately bend the world's primary computing environments to its proprietary advantage. The Chrome OS is one piece of this effort.

The question is one of which company will become the ultimate gatekeeper to all or most of enterprise computing, which is where the money is. Google wants that role and that is where its fight with Microsoft will lie.

As they say, "The law of human nature - it ain't been repealed yet."

extension• 17 years ago

Microsoft's success was based almost entirely on lock-in: they made everyone depend on something that only they could provide. The equivalent strategy for Google would obviously be to hoard the world's data in their private silos, which they are arguably already doing. I would find that scenario more plausible if it weren't for Wave.

Wave, by its nature, will obsolete or radically transform, many of Google's existing web apps: gmail, docs, blogger, picasa, calendar.. anything related to communication or collaboration. Yet, it seems as though they've gone to great lengths to make Wave decentralized, even as far as open sourcing their server implementation. They've done this even though a silo style Wave app would likely be a huge success anyway. I can't fathom why they would allow Wave to exist if they were hoping to control everyone's data, as it clearly represents a threat to the control they already have.

I'm not dropping my guard, but at this point my best guess is that Google is just trying to create an open and fair web ecosystem, in which they will compete based on their momentum and massive resources, and in which their major competitors lose their existing advantage. Either that, or they don't have much of a plan at all and the company is really just a bunch of smart people doing cool stuff with a huge pile of money that fell from the sky.

jackchristopher• 17 years ago

The danger is and always has been centralized control (and not just in software). No one should own the web OS — the web is ours.

Stallman & Co. foresaw this (at least) a decade ago. He's right to be worried. The real issue is: what are rights in the digital age? Who has control of what?

I might not back everything he's done. And he sometimes dismisses technical issues as trivial over political ones unnecessarily. But he is having the conversation at the right level of abstraction.

We'll keep facing the pitfalls of centralized power until we collectively decide to kill that beast permanently.

sfphotoarts• 17 years ago

Is this any different than someone else taking Ubuntu/Firefox and calling that the Firefox OS? Chrome isn't an operating system, linux is. This is a distribution and pre-installed browser. How is this anything different that what we currently have in the netbook market.

The real player in the future of netbooks is very likely Apple, not Google, because any netbook running OSX will also be able to not only run all the usual OSX apps but Chrome too...

mattn• 17 years ago

2 years ago I made cl33n, a Linux live CD that boots Linux, connects to the net, runs the Matchbox window manager and launches Firefox- that's all it does. ChromeOS is "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." cl33n is "Mozilla Firefox running within a little-used windowing system on top of a Linux kernel". cl33n isn't unique, Webconverger and other great live CDs do a similar "make it easy for anyone to browse safely" job.

Google cancelled cl33n's AdSense account 8 days ago, right before they were due to make their first payment. The site and its small traffic & AdSense revenue hasn't changed for 2 years (am working on an update now, I got kinda busy with a startup ;)). If cl33n did Bad Things then it's been doing them for 2 years now. I wonder if Google will refund the money to the advertisers?

I've appealed but have not received a response from Google. I still don't know what cl33n did to incur Google's wrath.

c00p3r• 17 years ago

They will probably build something like fbdev wrapper to run their browser along with Native Client and GPU-accelerated (even on ARM) ffmpeg's codecs for html5 support, and it could be a real deal. They will reuse 80% and build 20% as usual.

shimi• 17 years ago

I don't see the point, Android is using a Chrome version, so if you'll take Android remove Dalvik then you're getting a new OS?

By that definition I can remove all my apps from my Vista laptop except the browser and what do I get, an IE OS?

That's silly!!!

jsz02• 17 years ago

It's going to be interesting to see how committed Google is to this project. Google seems like a company these days with more ambition than substance sometimes. They have some really good services but they also have a lot of services that have seen very few, if any, significant improvements lately. It does remind me a bit of Microsoft when they had to get their fingers into every category of software even if they weren't offering a particularly good product. It was more about being in that space than actually being the best at it. I hope Google is not trying to go this route because it almost always ends up in mediocrity.

csomar• 17 years ago

Using Google Chrome OS, means that we throw Windows and OSX away. Windows or OSX (Desktop-application) are not good, flexible because they are dektop applications, but because they have dozen of years of user experience. Throwing this user experience away, means we are starting the OS history again, which is a lose of time and money. In my opinion!

yread• 17 years ago

I still think that Opera OS would be a better idea :)

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

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