Google Chrome OS and How the Web Went Nuts Over It

http://www.dailygyan.com/2009/07/google-chrome-os-and-how-web-went-nuts.html

by anoopengineer • 17 years ago

11 15 17 years ago

dailygyan.com

noamsml5• 17 years ago

Just random braindump from reading the article:

> 1. It’s very hard to get all the hardware makers to create drivers (or create them yourself) for your OS.

This is simply wrong, because Google isn't building an OS from scratch; they're using Linux.

> 2. It’s very hard to get all the software makers to create versions of their software that’ll work on your OS.

Also wrong. Many applications exist that already run on Google Chrome OS. They're called webapps. That's sort of the point.

>First of all, nobody seems to appreciate how goddamn hard it is to make an operating system. You don't just wake up one day and fall out of bed and make one.

Does NOBODY read the press releases? It's based on Linux! They have most of the work already done for them!

aj4• 17 years ago

It’s very hard to get all the hardware makers to create drivers (or create them yourself) for your OS.

Wrong. They are using the linux _kernel_ which does NOT include drivers for all (or any) hardware devices!

Also wrong. Many applications exist that already run on Google Chrome OS. They're called webapps. That's sort of the point.

That's sort of the point that you did not get. A lot of apps are NOT available as a web-app. Photoshop class image editing/creation app definitely not..

Does NOBODY read the press releases? It's based on Linux! They have most of the work already done for them!

You must be NOBODY since you obviously did not read the PR. It is the linux kernel only. While the kernel is a very important part of the OS, it is not the only part. Especially for a consumer centric OS, it definitely is not!

noamsml5• 17 years ago

> Wrong. They are using the linux _kernel_ which does NOT include drivers for all (or any) hardware devices!

Ugh. The kernel includes the drivers either in the kernel image itself (hence monolithic) or (more likely these days) as modules, most of which are part of the vanilla kernel source. ANYONE who's ever compiled a kernel knows this, because it's right in the config menu — which drivers to include and which not, which should be part of the image and which should be modules

> That's sort of the point that you did not get. A lot of apps are NOT available as a web-app. Photoshop class image editing/creation app definitely not..

Which is why Chrome is going to start as a Netbook OS — Netbooks are for people who won't be using photoshop. I say "start out" because with Chrome's ever-improving V8 engine, it may be possible at some point in the future to write a good image editor for the web using HTML5 canvas.

>You must be NOBODY since you obviously did not read the PR. It is the linux kernel only. While the kernel is a very important part of the OS, it is not the only part. Especially for a consumer centric OS, it definitely is not!

They said the Linux kernel (which apparently includes more than you thought it does). They didn't say only the linux kernel. I imagine glibc (or eglibc) stays. In fact, I suspect most of the GNU devland libraries will be present, if to be used only by OS developers and not by app developers. The only truly new thing we know about will be the X11 replacement, aside from that it could be debian or fedora all the way down.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

>First of all, nobody seems to appreciate how goddamn hard it is to make an operating system. You don't just wake up one day and fall out of bed and make one.

And even that is total nonsense, I wrote my own os about 15 years ago, it took about a year to get it to work. It is definitely possible to write an operating system, if an individual can do it a company with the resources of google could certainly do it (but they chose to leverage the linux kernel, and that's a good decision, even if personally I'd have liked to see google throw they weight behind some foss micro kernel).

noamsml5• 17 years ago

I think he means "good OS that works on lots of machines well".

aj4• 17 years ago

Good sum up. Amazing amount of hysteria. Especially liked the comment by The Register on Techcrunch..

NB. Wanted to comment, sucky comment box, did not bother trying to figure out why it is wonky.. Simply gave up.

TomOfTTB• 17 years ago

I don’t see what’s amazing about the amount of hysteria. Let’s be honest with ourselves here this news is entirely entertainment at this point. Google gave virtually no concrete facts, specs, etc... So no one could have any of their important decisions influenced by this even if they wanted to. This whole news meme is based entirely around idle speculation for entertainment’s sake.

Basically people are getting riled up for the sake of getting riled up (and the general public is riled up because all these big sites don’t post on a topic several times in a week if it isn’t driving the traffic)

So given the entertainment based nature of this isn’t a site like Techcrunch just doing its job by piling on the hyperbole to get their audience that much more emotionally riled up. I’d be willing to bet almost everyone who is denouncing the "hysteria" now passed up a bunch of professionally titled articles at the time and read Techcrunch’s "Google drops a nuclear bomb" post first.

aj4• 17 years ago

Heh. You probably misunderstood my post. I essentially agree with you. By hysteria I meant that everyone is getting oh so excited about chrome without too much detail calling it the windows/office/full scale OS killer

ujjwalg• 17 years ago

I love the way the author picked all the essentials from everywhere around the web and combined them together in a comprehensive format.

I do tend to agree that a web based OS is the way to go. Its not going to happen tomorrow, next year or 5 years down the line. But it will be the future. Every piece of software you use will be a web app with bunch load of analytics/monitored with a recommendation engine. I know it will go through a lot of skepticism for privacy reasons, but there will be laws amended to make sure that google or no one owns it. The web apps will be such that they are centric to mobile based smart phones and adobe air like software at the start and slowly adapt. Its the future, and I for one is already working towards achieving it for our apps. :)

-Ujjwal

jsz0• 17 years ago

I can only think of two major hardware support issues:

-Graphics drivers. Google won't be using X so that will require some work. I imagine both Intel and NVIDIA will be happy to comply. Intel has a strong commitment to OSS drivers and NVIDIA can ship a closed source driver. No problems there.

-iPods. This one is tricky. They could rely on the existing OSS code but they risk breakage or support for bleeding edge devices. Google would be wise to approach Apple and try to work something out.

Everything else should be well supported by Linux. I was impressed that Ubuntu 9 fully supported my celluar data card including a nice setup wizard. Google should definitely keep this in mind for ChromeOS as 3G cards are probably among the most common devices attached to netbooks.

Google Chrome OS and How the Web Went Nuts Over It

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