Google to Fold Chrome Operating System into Android
wsj.com
wsj.com
This is a horrible day for security.
The update system on Chrome is wonderful, in that it just happens. No strange dialog boxes, popup messages or confusing options for the computer-illiterate. It just goes ahead and does it. A power user might not like that, but it is a great system for a huge userbase.
How many insecure ChromeOS devices are there out there? Very few, I'd expect. Not many other operating systems can claim this.
That's damning with faint praise, isn't it? It can, at this point, do MOST of what an everyday Internet user might want? It's that whole 80/20 thing that everyone thought would let somebody overthrow Microsoft Office -- 80% of users only use 20% of the features. Well that's true and all, but it's not the same 20% for everyone, and you only have to miss one feature to make a Chromebook an untenable alternative to a Windows machine. There was a brief window where Chromebooks were significantly cheaper than a comparable Windows laptop but Intel took the ARM threat seriously, Microsoft took the licensing seriously and now the base Chromebook price from a name manufacturer isn't significantly cheaper than the HP Stream or what have you. "Most" is not going to cut it now that the price advantage is gone.
> There are lots of people who are content with its restrictions.
This is really only true in that we live on a planet with many, many lots of people, and so you can find lots of people for which almost anything holds true if you funnel it down. ChromeOS market share is a rounding error at this point, and if there were any signs that this was turning around, Google apparently decided they weren't enough for them to continue.
Sure, if you say so it must be true.
> How many insecure ChromeOS devices are there out there?
How many ChromeOS devices in absolute numbers are out there and what is the target audience of 200$ laptops?
If I were a hacker, I would certainly not target this platform.
Before Chrome OS, I ran homegrown minimal Linux installations with a separate user account to run Firefox. It was way too much overhead for me to be excited about maintaining, and paying $200 for a secure architecture and security updates by the most competent people in the industry was super attractive. I can do servers very well; I don't also need to do desktops, let alone my personal desktop.
I'm all for allowing native applications a place to run, however that doesn't mean that ChromeOS was not able to do anything... both my parents and grandparents are all on ChromeOS laptops now... why? It's all they need, secure and I haven't had to remotely clear out any malware in over a year.
This is pretty much one of the two markets I've ever heard of for ChromeOS machines, the other being education space. What they have in common is that:
1) People want them for SOMEBODY ELSE 2) Because they don't trust that somebody else with the power of a less locked-down machine.
Sure, schools are buying ChromeOS machines... for the students. Not the teachers and administrators. It's too limited of a market segment for ChromeOS to grow a large enough userbase.
Except for an operating system, of course.
Nope, it was called Smalltalk.
* chromebooks
* web browsers
* a turing machine implemented by having a grad student a car drive around on a long street
Of course it might be a bit slower, it might take a bit more effort, time and imagination on the part of the user.
But seriously: it needs to run existing programs without recompilation.
..Or maybe you simply have a deficient imagination?
This is horrible from a usability perspective. Note that large bulk laptop purchasers (schools, large enterprises with mostly web application requirements etc.) have been the biggest markets for chromebook. One of the biggest reasons for that popularity is the lower cost of management of chromebooks compared to windows or mac laptops. In that the base OS not only just works, it also just updates. A huge saving in admin time and headache. The other factor is that all user data is automatically in the cloud, which means backups/restores/replacements/upgrades are trivial operations now.
One way chromebooks can retain this ease of use/administration is by basically shipping a laptop with chrome running on Android OS but no other apps installable by the user (outside of chrome sandbox). This will get Google out of the two OS kernels management business but could still retain the essential goodness of the chromebook concept.
There are quite a few device management solutions out there for Android that can white list, black list, deny all installs of apps. It's very common to setup in business and already completely supported.
It's even far more powerful than that with capabilities to do things like deny certain apps/networks unless you have certain password complexity requirements, etc..
So each app will continue to ask for access to everything and you choose between being info-excluded or giving away your data.
> buy-in from the OEMs to push those patches
How does this work? Is there any legal obligation for manufacturers/vendors to provide these patches in X weeks?
If there isn't then I won't keep my hopes up.
> from moving big parts of the OS to userland so they can be updated separately from the core system
How exactly? By moving from Android to google proprietary apps? If so then this is a two-edged sword as it inevitably binds you to google spyware. Either you own an half-phone or you give away your data.
Sorry if I sound bitter but I see what Android could be and get defeated by what it is.
I never owned an iPhone but my next phone will be one. Maybe I'll still be disappointed, but at least won't have to deal with CM, Xprivacy, manual updates and all the other shenanigans.
Disclaimer: I'm an increasingly disappointed Android user.
I think you might misunderstand what the Marshmallow upgrade will allow. Users will have the ability to turn off any given permission for any given app. Don't want google maps to have GPS access? Cool, just turn it off and the app will have to deal with the lack of information. It's not a Windows model carte blanche per-run thing.
Sure, apps can be abusive and ask for more permissions than they need and refuse to run if they don't have them, but that's a problem with any conceivable permission system.
Apps under the new model will only ask for permissions when they need it. So, when you decide to post a picture to Facebook, that's when Android asks if you want to give the Facebook app access to your pictures on storage. If you deny it, it lets the app know it doesn't have access. If it's an older app that doesn't understand, it gets fake data as if you had no photos (or no contacts, etc). At least that was my understanding from reading about it.
Note that this security model is similar to web apps wanting to "connect" with you Google account (or Twitter or Facebook for that matter) to access your contacts or similar.
It's disappointing. I saw a Chromebook used by a "normal" person for the first time this week. He loved it. The only benefit for me was the fact you could run Linux in some sense on it, and it was cheap and stealable without too much sadness!
But this merging of browser-OS and insecure Android has signed the death warrant on my devices. Goodbye Samsung and Sony.
When a user has control over updates, the company selling the product carries a relatively low responsibility. When a company does not allow a user to update, then that company carries a much higher responsibility.
If Google provides a security update and a company refuses to update their devices (or allow users to update), then that company has a lot to lose.
The Android ecosystem would be a lot better off if there were a couple large class-action lawsuits with big payouts. Companies really don't care until it hits their bottom line.
I surely won't pay what Google is asking for their devices, given lack of SD card and changeable battery.
Plus, they also proved they aren't trustworthy by not providing a path for those that gave them money for the Nexus with TI processor. As if Google didn't had the money to keep supporting them.
If, as stated in the article, they merge ChromeOS into Android, rather than abandoning ChromeOS in favor of Android (which seems to be how you and many others have interpreted it), they aren't limited to what is currently in Android, since they bring all the capabilities of ChromeOS are now in Android. A merger is functionally equivalent regardless of direction, which just becomes about branding (and its hardly surprising that Android is the more marketable brand.)
And that's pretty much the answer...
BTW, I've found Samsung to be decent with updates as well.
Personally, I'm not so much upset because Android is uncommonly bad (it's like any other system that gives untrusted users non-root access to Linux: you can probably get away with it, but eh), but because CrOS is uncommonly good.
This is far from true. Android has always had a ton of sandboxing. Every app is its own user, unable to interact arbitrarily with other apps, things like that.
You won't find any desktop OS that comes anywhere close to the security design of Android. But the thorn in Android's security side remains updates, or lack thereof.
> Android's attack surface is much higher than Chrome OS's.
Not really. All you have to do in CrOS is compromise Chrome (which has happened plenty of times), and you have owned the user. You've won. Game over. And Chrome's attack surface is huge, just like any other browser's. The kernel syscall interface is relatively tiny, and SELinux clamps that down even further.
Doesn't seem correct: https://source.android.com/devices/tech/security/overview/ke...
Lenovo, Samsung, Apple and Google are all in complete control of the devices they sell: they all control hardware, software and services themselves.
If the software is based on Android or not has nothing to do with how often these devices get updates.
Desktop OSes are generally pretty bad. Unsandboxed Windows and OS X apps can do an awful lot with your computer.
I really like that Apple and Microsoft are pushing for sandbox models in their OSes.
Of course there are things like HP-UX safes, Tru64 and Solaris trusted zones.
None of them are POSIX.
Besides the average user would not even know where to start.
You can use VMs for some of that, but that's the limit on sharing (and that's if you trust your hypervisor to be a separation kernel thing; reasonable for many people. Not for others.) Docker/containers isn't enough. Users aren't enough. Processes aren't enough.
With Microsoft producing a laptop of their own that starts at $1499, I think all we can really say is "Apple doesn't produce bargain laptops".
Typically not in the segment where they compete (high-end laptops). However, the cheapest MacBook (in Germany) is 999 Euro. A large chunk of the market cannot afford or does not want to spend 999 Euro on a laptop. If you only want to e-mail, upload/view some photos, make a spreadsheet, a 999 Euro MacBook is expensive compared to a 200 Euro Chromebook or 300 Euro Windows laptop.
The complicating factor, and why it's such an enduring belief, is that Apple doesn't ship adware and has minimal hardware standards which are higher than the lowest-end PC market. You see this over and over again where someone is either unable to back up claims or, when pressed, has to admit that the $400 notebook they said was “just like” the MacBook Air had a previous generation processor, magnetic hard drive instead of SSD, low-contrast/dim display, mushy keyboard or unusable trackpad, etc. The same manufacturer probably even makes something fairly competitive, too, but it costs about as much.
I think for directly comparable hardware its not much more expensive, but:
1) the entry price is higher -- to get a minimally functional Apple laptop or desktop you're paying more than any of the alternatives.
2) the smaller number of Apple models compared to any major PC maker (much less the union of all PC makers) means that, unless your hardware preferences happen to match perfectly to an Apple model, you're often able to find a PC that matches your preferences less expensively simply because you are unlikely to have to overshoot your target as far as with Apple.
Minimum wage before taxes - 505 €
Average PC price at a retail store - 400 €
Windows has a huge lock-in for the business world due to compatibility, and a few other niches like high-end gaming for similar reasons. Without API compatibility that's a really tough space to get into.
It's quite believable that Android/ChromeOS will take over the netbook market by being cheaper than Windows, and the premium personal market – which is where most of the profit is – if they can get quality hardware shipping at prices competitive enough to make up for the lack of applications (almost all Android apps will need some sort of UI modifications) but it really doesn't seem like they'll get anywhere in the business world. Cracking that means either convincing everyone to drop legacy apps for web apps or remote clients (how many more decades?) or offering API compatibility (invest heavily in WINE?) — otherwise, the cost of a Windows license isn't that much (especially with 10) and certainly not enough to push someone towards the most limited option.
Every store I visit the cheapest laptop-like devices are windows 10 devices, 20-30$ cheaper than chrome os devices. Android ones certainly exist, but only start at roughly double the price of cheap windows 10 machines.
Those windows 10 machines aren't even bad. If you need office + browser they work pretty well.
Just checking today on Amazon:
Cheapest chromebook: 161.99 (and that's the Asus C201, as in STAY AWAY). Cheapest vaguely reasonable chromebook ~210
Cheapest windows 10 laptop: 164.89. This one is actually usable. Screen resolution being the biggest minus point.
Cheapest android "laptop": 165, and this is not something you want. Cheapest one you do want: ~$300. There are cheaper android laptops, but they're chinese duplicates you do not want.
Outside of the US, windows 10 laptops win by a mug bigger margin.
To drop good apps for web apps.
Also, was there a reason you started referring to specific versions of OS's like Windows 10 and BB OS 10 and then disrespectfully mentioned Android without a version number? Don't you think that was a bit disingenuous, and lame, of you to start mentioning specific OS versions and leave out Android? If you're going to use version numbers then shouldn't you have applied them to all of the OS's you mentioned instead of cherry picking OS versions and then shitting out the line "And then there's Android" at the end?
Alright, as something of an Android fanboy it pains me to admit, he probably has a point in this case. But it'd be nice to hear about what specifically is wrong, especially since it would seem there's a fair bit right, like SELinux, automatic encryption, ASLR. The worst thing in my view, is the permissions system, which is probably salvageable (and as I understand it, was improved in Marshmallow.) 'rdl has given more details about pretty much every imaginable system but Android -- are we supposed to just assume Android does every bad thing he mentioned, and the opposite of every good thing?
Edit: I could almost let this slide since the particular counter-comment was equally vacuous. It's still annoying to see "security guy from $BIG_CO => GTFO" (who is apparently smarter than all the security people at Google who've worked on Android, but we just have to take your word for it since you didn't elaborate.)
The he can give reasons about his comments.
until now, they sound just like hatred and nothing more.
Appealing to authority is always a bad thing without any arguments backing the claims
I've tried using an Android tablet for work. It's nigh impossible, even with a keyboard because it doesn't support multi-tasking well. Sure, it supports OS multi-tasking, but it doesn't support user multi-tasking.
Android is based around the single-task model. You have a foreground app that takes up the entire screen and other apps are backgrounded. You can switch between apps fairly quickly, but you can only have one open at a time. There are some attempts to fix this, such as Samsung's split-screen, but none are officially supported. We've even moved to having Chrome tabs use this model.
I love my Chromebook for work though. It does everything I need to do, including having multiple document windows open for multi-tasking.
Chrome OS is built on a multi-task model. You can have many windows open at once and quickly switch between them without losing state or visibility.
Windows tried to merge the two with Windows 8 and it was a terrible user experience. The last thing I want for my dual 24" monitors is to be able to only use one window at a time. Having a messaging app take up the entire monitor is ridiculous. Hopefully they'll find a middle ground. Until user multi-tasking exists in Android I won't be using it for anything but my phone.
I wonder (and have no idea, just throwing the idea out there), if people would be more productive in that single tasking environment.
That said, I do use a tiling window manager on my 13" laptop for work. I mostly use full-screen mode, but it works well for me, because switching is very fast.
> humans don't do multi-tasking well
- Google has Chromium developers working on a DART-based Mobile UI framework and execution engine, Flutter (http://flutter.io/). It's looking to be far better than the existing Android UI system - built for touch and 120fps from the start. This uses the Dartium VM and a bridge to allow the DART apps to use all the native features of the platform, it's much more than just another web framework. Development on this is very active right now, clearly a sizable team working fulltime - and they're building new developer tools also. There was a talk on this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnIWl33YMwA .
- Google has built a Runtime to allow existing Android Java-based apps to run on Chrome OS, and is currently testing this and working with developers to get their apps to run on it. It doesn't make much sense to invest in building that out just for chromebooks, since the experience on a Chromebook with Android apps is pretty awful (can't resize etc), but it makes total sense if it's going to be how legacy Java/Android apps run on the new Chrome based phone OS.
The sad truth is that Android simply isn't a very well engineered system - it's been improved over time, but problems persist - like the complex update process leading to unsatisfied users and security problems, poor UI performance (even now, Android can barely do simple animations at a steady 60fps on the latest Nexus devices, and has little hope of allowing for the beautiful animations the Material Design team has come up with), and poor battery life. Google's also at a dead-end with Java given the ongoing legal battles, and with Apache Harmony dead they have to maintain the standard library implementation themselves.
On the other hand, Chrome OS performs great, has awesome battery life on Chromebooks, is quite possibly the most secure end-user OS ever, and Chromebooks get speedy updates for at least 5 years. I know which one I'd choose as the basis for a merged OS.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/29/9639950/google-combining-...
Because otherwise I'd just completely utterly ignore any and all Chromebooks since it'd be effectively obsolete and probably unsupported as soon as 2017 Rolls around.
+ Being able to run Android apps on a Chromebook would be awesome. There's already some limited support for this, but it would be nice for it to be official.
+ Taking over the Chromebook line would hopefully force Google to make document editing not suck on Android devices.
+ Android running on Chromebooks will hopefully make the display scale better on hi-DPI devices.
- ChromeOS is fairly lightweight and actually runs surprisingly well on cheap devices. I have no doubt that my Chromebook Pixel would run Android just fine, but the Samsung ARM Chromebook would probably chug, even though it's running ChromeOS well enough.
- Making Android run on laptops will hopefully make Google step up their Android document editing game, but as of right now it still sucks. Even the cheap Samsung chromebook was leagues ahead of using my tablet and a bluetooth keyboard in terms of trying to compose documents.
- The ability to install crouton on Chromebooks and have another Linux chroot on the side is an awesome feature of the Chromebook. I imagine that might be more difficult under Android, even though it still uses the linux kernel.
Plenty of inexpensive ARM devices running Android. I don't see that this is likely to be a major problem.
> Making Android run on laptops will hopefully make Google step up their Android document editing game, but as of right now it still sucks. Even the cheap Samsung chromebook was leagues ahead of using my tablet and a bluetooth keyboard in terms of trying to compose documents.
If they're folding ChromeOS into Android, rather than just killing ChromeOS, I expect that (using similar Chrome apps) post-convergence Android devices will be at least as good as pre-convergence ChromeOS devices at document editing.
I'm hoping that since they're now targeting the desktop OS market that they'll make it easier to run native linux programs on Android. My biggest complaint of using ChromeOS on a pixel 2 is that there are no good text editors on the level of Sublime Text (which works on linux).
Atom works great in Crouton on my pixel 2. I've switched to that as my full-time dev machine. I run everything but Atom in terminals. I run Atom in an X window (xiwi) and have no linux desktop at all. Lean and mean.
If this is really where things are going, it wouldn't surprise me if crouton contributors continued the project for Android post convergence.
Flash is dying off and if Android gets better desktop window manager and shell (the bar is already set too low - ChromeOS sucked with its stupid everything including WiFi settings in Chrome, tiny fonts and web-only apps) people will finally have a credible alternative to Windows desktops/laptops. Plus this gives Google a chance to do something like Continuum - without having to be beholden to x86 for apps like MS.
Speaking of which I don't believe in Continuum. It's an idea that's natural coming from a company that has a desktop OS and wants to leverage that in order to maybe win some market share on mobile. I first heard of the idea from Canonical with their Ubuntu phone, another company trying to leverage a desktop OS.
It's a cool idea for geeks, but made obsolete by cloud-enabled apps like Google Docs. Why would one need Continuum when the changes you make in Google Docs on your phone are reflected immediately on every device or PCs you have?
With the new Windows licensing Windows is the better alternative to ChromeOS - you can do more at the same price and you can lock it down if you need to a la ChromeOS. In some ways Google is stepping up the game - with Android you can do more.
Good point about Google Docs use case however that's very limited - If I carry the shared storage of my phone with me, if I can blow up the phone to use two monitors and still have my missed calls, SMSs etc in front of me - it enables a greater use case. There is definitely merit in that if continuum is done right.
On missed calls and SMSs, with my iOS device I get both SMS messages and phone calls through iMessage and Facetime on my MacBook. With my Android device I do the same for SMS messages, plus all the notifications I'm interested in with PushBullet.
The US Justice Department forced Microsoft to stop offering special deals on Windows so all the top suppliers paid the same price (1). I assume that's lifted now that Microsoft is no longer closely monitored by the DoJ. Anyone know?
(1) Which seemed to have the (presumably) unintended effect of pushing up the average price of Windows and increasing Microsoft's profits.
They have a very low cost license for OEMs that sell cheap devices - those get upgraded to Windows 10 for free. I can't find a source for Win 10 licensing but I'd be surprised if they aren't continuing the zero dollar licensing for a subset of devices.
You're not thinking long-term enough. You should be asking, "why would one need a PC when you can just stick your phone in a dock?".
It's going to take a while for hardware to catch up, but in about a decade I think desktops will almost exclusively be used as high-end workstations for stuff like 3-D rendering, scientific number crunching, and maybe hardcore gaming, while anything with fewer demands will be satisfied by a phone using Continuum or something like it.
For one you're assuming that current computing capacity is enough for most people. However current computing capacity is enough only for current applications of it. In a decade from now however people are going to get interested in virtual reality and artificial intelligence. It's inevitable. Plus the gaming industry, just like the housing industry, has always sucked all surplus.
And there are hard limits to how small transistors can get, or to how fast wireless networks can be. But problematic are also the batteries, for which Moore's law never applied. Only 5 years ago I was using a phone whose battery lasted for at least 7 days. How about your current phone?
Another problem is that no matter how powerful a phone can be, it's still handicapped by its small screen real-estate. The form factor of a laptop is optimized for productivity work while remaining portable. A physical keyboard is more productive than typing things on a touch screen. A 13-inch screen is more comfortable than a 4.7 inch screen for doing any kind of productivity work. I can go to a coffee shop, pull out my 13-inch laptop and instantly be productive. And transporting around a dock, a keyboard and a monitor to plug-in your phone in case you need it would be more impractical and would defeat the purpose of that phone.
I concede that there will be people interested in using their phone as a general computing device. Those will be the same people that are doing that today, as in the people that lack the resources to buy multiple devices. A very important and probably big market, but still.
With Windows Continuum, you plug an external monitor and a keyboard into your Windows 10 Phone. You get a desktop style experience on the big screen but you can continue to do phone stuff on the phone.
BUILD 2015 Continuum session - Windows Phone as a PC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdzbXo38onQ
It becomes significantly interesting for the odd 4 billion people who will own a smartphone one day but may never own a laptop.
Toshiba tried something similar with a PocketPC (powered by Windows CE) a couple of decades ago, but it didn't work well enough to go anywhere.
I'm fairly sure most AI will be done in the cloud. We're already going in that direction, with stuff like Google Now.
VR is an interesting question... I'm really excited about the HoloLens, and I'm really curious to see where things go from there. Honestly, I think AR might become a big deal once we start getting wearables that aren't super clunky.
Actually, introducing wearables to the mix also introduces the idea of a personal cloud of devices. The concept of a PAN has been talked about for a while, but we haven't really seen it amount to much, unless you count things like Bluetooth headsets. Cheap, stylish wearables with phone-quality processors, however, can change all that (I don't think we're at either cheap enough or stylish enough yet... but that's a big "yet").
Think beyond smartwatches or googles, too. Imagine wearing a smartshirt and smartpants and smartshoes. Imagine if every single thing you wore on your body had a CPU in it. I think we'd avoid the problem of how small transistors can get just by sticking sources of computing power everywhere. Of course, this paragraph is all pie-in-the-sky far-future stuff. Prices will need to come down to the same range as normal articles of clothing, which will take a long time. And we'll have to have a seamless way to charge your clothes that won't add any more mental overhead. Nobody wants to say "sorry, I have to stay home, I forgot to charge my pants last night".
> But problematic are also the batteries, for which Moore's law never applied.
I think at some point there's going to be a backlash against thinness, and we'll start seeing bigger devices with thicker batteries. Wouldn't surprise me if portable power sources take off too (I'm already seeing external battery packs being sold at department stores, of all places), especially if inductive charging becomes a bit less clunky. Women might be a good driver of this technology: for example, I can see a system where you just drop your phone into your purse, and it magnetically attaches to a wireless charging mat plugged into a battery pack.
> Another problem is that no matter how powerful a phone can be, it's still handicapped by its small screen real-estate. The form factor of a laptop is optimized for productivity work while remaining portable. A physical keyboard is more productive than typing things on a touch screen. A 13-inch screen is more comfortable than a 4.7 inch screen for doing any kind of productivity work. I can go to a coffee shop, pull out my 13-inch laptop and instantly be productive. And transporting around a dock, a keyboard and a monitor to plug-in your phone in case you need it would be more impractical and would defeat the purpose of that phone.
Of course, you're assuming nobody will make a laptop-shaped dock that you can insert a phone into like a cartridge. Think something like the Asus PadFone [0], but with a laptop instead of a tablet. The only real barrier to that right now is that every shell has to be matched with specific models of phone, because every phone has a different size and shape, but I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing standardized form factors at some point in the near future.
Better yet, combine that with a setup like the Surface Book, and you'll have a phone that can dock into a tablet that can dock into a laptop.
[0] http://d5htu2v3nddyh.cloudfront.net/media/catalog/product/a/...
Instead, ask why you'll need a phone when UI devices become invisible, ubiquitous, and networked.
Eventually, our children (grandchildren?) will laugh at our phone obsession. I'm imagining a silent reel of a Charlie Chaplin figure repeatedly patting all his pockets searching for his phone, dropping it when he does find it, pecking the wrong portion of the screen, and then when he finally answers the call discovering that the battery is dead. In other words, me, every day.
But at the same time, how many devices will the average person use? More or fewer? If it's more, then no matter what -- even if we don't know what those devices will be -- you want it to be easy to switch between them, which is the problem Continuum is solving.
I think this is Google hedging its bets again and getting ready for whatever unpredictable thing happens next. They just assume it will include a proliferation of devices.
For that you need connectors, that are big, unsightly and brittle - or high bandwidth, ultra low latency wireless.
From the engineering point, it is much simpler just throw separate device into the mix. From the business point of view, more profitable too.
You know you can run Thunderbolt over USB-C, right? There's no reason that even five years from now, I shouldn't be able to plug my iPhone into my iMac in Target Display mode using the same cable I use to charge it.
May 2010: Om Malik "Android Has Won — Time for Chrome OS to Move Along?"
But one thing is for sure, ARM is coming to desktop computing!
Google: Blend devices so the experience is seamless, tracking across devices is unbroken, and get as much reach as possible with the free OS
MS: Blend devices so the experience is seamless, tracking across devices is unbroken, and then ultimately once people are sufficiently bought in, switch the OS to a fully subscription-based model with strong lock-in
Apple: Best experience for each unique device with strong ties between them because they make their money on the devices.
Only when it actually came out was it clear that iOS was a separate thing.
The same can be said for Windows (7/8/10) and WinPhone8+ and XBox, all run a Windows NT kernel with different userland and APIs.
And Android and ChromeOS have the same OS under the hood too, modified Linux kernel with different userland.
The human interface is nearly the whole point of the device. But moreover, it's not true, the difference with mobile is right in the name.
Not limited battery life? The fact that the device "moves"? I think there are a few more differences than UI ...
I was blown away by the new Microsoft Surface Book but I don't think that I will buy one. I really like my 1080p Chromebook and along with two old Mac laptops and an older Linux laptop, I just don't see the motivation to get a new laptop. I could see myself getting the Pro iPad of a Surface 4 in the future.
I used to think that a key part of my software development workflow was sitting on my deck with a yellow notepad and a comfortable pen. I now use a tablet for thinking time.
Yep and Apple's new MacBook and iPad Pro are a sign of Apple's future doing this.
how well does a full-fledged Chrome on ARM perform? Does it even exist?
The move to convertible devices is being driven by and catering to enterprise users. Microsoft is in the lead here with the Surface, and they're trying to extend this to their phones but they may not be able to overcome the handicap of nobody wants their phones. Apple is playing from behind here because there's walls between iOS and OS X that they won't cross, but they have inroads into the enterprise space, they have enough native iOS productivity apps that work well on tablets (Adobe and ironically Microsoft are both heavily into the iOS productivy app space, and that's a huge part of the market) that the iPad Pro is... unappealing to me personally but quite possibly will be successful in the marketplace.
Google has... Chromebooks, which have no apps and no market penetration outside of the very, very captive education market (where IT administrators just want computers so locked down that teenagers can't do too much damage). And they have Android, which (in tablets at least) has almost no enterprise penetration and very little in terms of productivity apps. And the merging of ChromeOS with Android in order to tackle the enterprise market and the Surface line and the iPad Pro makes a lot of sense. But I'm not sure either papers over the other's flaws enough to make it viable, and I'm definitely not convinced that they're going to be able to be combined in a way that incorporates what ChromeOS does well that Android doesn't, like system software updates.
However, Office 365 for the Mac (2016) regularly crashes. All 4 of us that use it at my company have experienced this. I can't remember the last time Google Docs crashed or screwed up a document.
So, it amazes me that the quality of MS Office is so incredibly low. This is not the way to win any market.
Presumably, OS X 10.11.1 fixes some problems with Office 2016 when you are running El Capitan. I am two-minded when it comes to Google Docs and Office 365. On the one hand, Office 365 is an offer you cannot resist (especially the academic pricing). Microsoft Office documents are a fact of life, Office 365 gives you continuous updates and 1TB of OneDrive space.
On the other hand, last time I compared them, Google Docs' collaboration story was far better. Collaborative editing in Docs is really smooth, while in Office it was hit and miss.
I'm running 10.10.5, and that is a version of Mac OS X they support. So, "fixed in 10.11" is not at all interesting to me.
Anything I need to do, I can do through web services, remote desktop or chrome remote desktop.
The one thing I have come to love about ChromeOS is the security. I don't need to worry as much and I have confidence in using my Chromebook all the time.
My phone is android and maybe I am just suffering from Verizon abuse, but I've never had the same security confidence with my phone. And I think this will be the issue. Most people only know Android through a phone experience and it's left a bad taste in their mouth.
Anyway, the Google folks are smart. My hope is the security and reliability of ChromeOS is what is taken and folded into Android.
I specifically only use a conventional laptop when I need to use IntelliJ or otherwise do local development.
I think that computer related crime will increase and using more secure devices, when possible, makes a lot of sense.
I don't have high hopes though, the obstacles against this seem pretty huge.
So this is a good move for Google, ideally they cut down the infighting between the two groups, get rid of the lower 5% of both groups leaving them with a combined, more effective group with a well defined mission.
It will be interesting to see if they can make enough money at it though.
It's notable that iOS and Android still don't have native support for composing declarative UIs, notwithstanding marvelous hacks like React Native. Web technologies aren't perfect, but the use of markup for UI with well-integrated APIs is something that WebOS, FirefoxOS, etc got right a long time ago. It doesn't even have to be HTML... look at QML.
I'm hoping that Android will take on some of those characteristics, and not subsume ChromeOS without a trace.
The last thing we need is Android expanding to desktop and causing even further rift.
I can't stand Android (or smartphones in general). There is something fundamentally wrong with asking the user to install the JRE on a separate machine just to get a login shell on the phone.
I was very sad the day my N900 died, which was a better Linux workstation (with a real keyboard) in a phone-sized device. But then the cheap Acer Chromebooks came out, and Coreboot makes installing vanilla Linux such a snap. The Acer Chromebooks are light enough that I can almost carry it around and use it like I would a smartphone.
Being able to make calls through some kind of unlocked Chromebook / phone hybrid would be a step what my N900 offered, but on the other hand, I just despise Android so much from the point of view of a Linux user that I'm not sure it's be worth it.
When I get around to it I'll probably just build a phone using FONA.
I'll be very surprised if they remove either feature from future Chromebooks.
Merging with Android means nothing really, unless they plan to replace java-based Android apps with a runtime that natively supports webapps.
Lets call this what it really is. Alphabet/Google is killing any project that doesn't directly contribute revenue via advertising or Google Play sales.
Not really. This is Google rationalising their client OS strategy to be one rather than two. I'm amazed it took them this long.
unless they plan to replace java-based Android apps with a runtime that natively supports webapps
Replace? No. But Android has been picking up a lot of features that allow webapps to behave like native ones. Home screen installation, notifications...
This is sort of what Apple did when they bought out Next and merged NextOS with MacOS to make Mac OSX that ran Unix apps along with Mac apps.
If only Microsoft would merge Windows with Linux to make Winux or something that runs Windows and Linux apps.
That's obviously not true. See: Google Cloud Platform, Calico, and so on.
"Alphabet/Google is killing any product that doesn't directly contribute ongoing revenue"
That would include Google Cloud like you mentioned and exclude Calico as that is currently a research project.
People see the OS as free these days. They get updates to their iPad, iPhone, Mac and Android (kind of, depends on the OEM) without having to pay.
New computer = new version of windows.
(edit: I know Sundar and Google are extraordinarily brilliant and know what they're doing...I am just envisioning Pixel C type devices, and this isn't the direction I think anyone thought Chromebooks were headed. I'll try to be more optimistic!)
You can either find the same article in Google News; use a bookmarklet like Wait, Google Sent Me; or read The Verge's rehash of the WSJ article.
Search the headline in google, then click the wsj link. If you're using chrome just highlight headline, right click, search, and then click wsj link.
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/09/14/hacker-news-faq-1-ho...
thanks
Since its inception, Chrome OS has made security a focus and put a large amount of work into it, everything from bootloaders to Linux kernel features such as seccomp-BPF and KASLR, to complement the existing high security of Chrome itself. It also borrows Chrome's silent and fast update mechanism, allowing for frequent security updates. Its sandbox may feel somewhat limiting, but for those who do manage to stay within it, Chrome OS is probably the most secure desktop platform in common use.
Meanwhile, even if Android's update issues were somehow solved, it has a pretty bad security reputation even apart from that, with a long list of historical vulnerabilities which could be basically said to stem from a lack of priority given to it (e.g. from designs which, while not inherently insecure, unnecessarily open up attack surface that could be eliminated with a better design, such as in the case of the "master key" vulnerabilities; or just from crappy code, such as binder - whether caused by lack of auditing or just lack of security awareness among its authors I don't know, but both can be considered part of making security a priority). Maybe things have gotten better, and I don't have that much experience with Android, but there is simply no comparison between the general Android app sandbox (which allows native code) and what you get under Chrome with NaCl and such. The latter isn't perfect (as I know, because I've exploited it repeatedly), but the attack surface to examine for bugs is just much smaller than on other systems. I'm not really giving it any justice with this brief description.
I guess that if you're especially worried about security you could just only use Chrome on Android, and not install or use any other apps, and that would get you most of the way there. Indeed, if you do so, you can still have access to the Chrome Web Store's paltry selection of apps - it's cross-platform, you don't have to go for the OS designed around it...
But essentially nobody will do that. And even if they did, the recent Stagefright vulnerabilities demonstrate the difficulty of accounting for every potential attack surface on an OS, and thus the benefit of having the OS engineers design the lockdown rather than the user coming up with something ad-hoc. (Plus, today at least, even under Chrome's sandbox, Android's version of the Linux kernel is not as secure as Chrome OS's. And again, this is all assuming Android slow update problem is solved, which is a pretty big assumption considering how long it's been around; if it isn't, that's already enough to basically doom platform security.)
So if Chrome OS is really folded into Android, the end result, I think, will be the destruction in practice of something that was really quite unique in the security world. Maybe I shouldn't be so pessimistic - after all, those same security engineers could now work on Android. But I am, because even if work is done on it, the platform just comes from such a different place that it would be hard to make the same.
I recently bought a netbook(ACER) for $190 that I loaded with Linux and does everything I need, really why do I need ChromeOS?
Both ChromeOS and Android are OSes, it's like two Linux distributions, I don't know why they should "merge", what's the benefit for doing that? is it merge-able considering Android is such a JVM-hack?
Android is bent and tested in unthinkable ways due to its reach. Let's see if Chrome OS is up to it.
It self updates once installed (you can also downgrade if needed!) and we also have the entire rootfs in https://github.com/webconverger/webc for easy review. We https://webconverger.org/wireshark/ official Firefox releases to ensure it doesn't chat to third parties.
https://webconverger.org/blog/2015/ChromeOS_versus_Webconver...
For years, Google insisted that there was an important difference because Android was for touchscreens and ChromeOS was for keyboards and pointing devices. But that went out the window when they released the Pixel. Suddenly, both Android and ChromeOS had to support touch, and there was no contest between them.
You see, ChromeOS is just a web browser running as the graphical shell. Android has a web browser, and it also has its own application platform. We end up with a comparison between "web browser + touch" and "web browser + touch + non-web applications", making Android objectively superior (when, before ChromeOS supported touch, you could argue that ChromeOS could have a better UI because it didn't need to support the peculiarities of a touch interface).
It makes no sense for Google to sell both a full-featured OS and a crippled OS.
They should just integrate it closer, which can be done without running the same OS. Heck, even Microsoft could do it. Just how do companies justify screwing over customers to simplify board meetings. About the last thing I want my trusty Chromebook to do is for it to be become Galaxy Booktab Duos III. Which, given that I have Samsung version, it will become.
I only stopped using ChromeOS because Microsoft hired me and gave me a computer that cost 5x as much. Google did an admirable job in optimizing for low-end hardware, but there is a point where you can only eek so much out of a dual-core ARM with 2Gb of RAM.
On the other hand, my android phone (which cost the same as the chromebook) regularly struggles to load the homescreen.
It seems Apple have been very successful with iOS, but making smart enhancements like gestures and split screen that Google just never did. And of course Microsoft are doing very interesting things with Windows on tablets.
The browser is a pretty terrible platform for most things to be honest. I say this as someone who is using it to develop their startup as a web app and as someone who has been doing web apps since there wasn't even such a term. When people at work used to tell me how amazing the browser as as a platform, I'd ask them to do simple things that the browser sucks at vs. other platforms. For example, I'd ask people to simply to do various kinds of positioning tasks, alignment, centering, etc. It's amazing how hard at various points in the history of the browser, css, js, etc. it's been to do these seemingly easy tasks. The lengths one has to go to just to get acceptable performance in many scenarios is shocking.
The browser is nice in many ways, but sometimes the ease of printing to the screen is a curse. I am reminded of people writing 20 line BASIC programs way back when and thinking that made them master programmers. The instant gratification and pushing aside of various concerns is great, until you hit those road blocks that are crippling for many types of apps. Somewhere there are old embedded dev colleagues of mine wondering why their new powerful computer is practically on its knees with a bunch of tabs open showing improperly aligned pictures of cats. The browser is great, easy for many things, but that does not always make something good and worth using for every task, or even most tasks. Sadly, a lot of what I see in the browser is cobbled together nonsense that does very little and reminds me of the machine that goes bing.
I know it's an unpopular belief here, but the browser is honestly built on a rotten core from rendering to security to data transport/format. Hindsight is always easier, but the thing is we do have it, and yet we continue to invest in it like there is never going to be another alternative.
I could go on, but suffice to say I wonder sometimes if continuing to build on the browser, and even the web itself is really worth the pain. I wish we'd take a step back and look at the internet itself, and if not that, than at least building other things on the internet like in earlier days. Sometimes I find myself wishing for simple text based menus or something like gopher because at least you found stuff, got things done, and they would be even faster and more efficient now that many of us have decent connections.
Which reasons?
The web was supposed to be a, well, web of interlinked documents. Using the web as an applications platform has always been an ugly, ugly kludge.
Let's separate our document-browsing system from our applications platform again.
I'll save any criticisms I have for when I actually know what the ultimate combination looks like.
I personally believe that SteamOS jumped the gun by not taking a bold step in this direction. It would have tapped into a even bigger developer community, accelerated the adoption of Vulkan and would have moved towards a larger Linux mindshare. It would have been an awesome world where most android apps could run on my desktop and my desktop has drivers that works with all graphics cards.
Reference: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/14/gmail-creator-paul-buchheit...
Diagnostics, usage telemetry, advertising, tracking etc.?
I've never used ChromeOS and I'm more concerned about these things potentially making into stock Android (more than is already there now anyway).
Not developers.
I gather this had made it popular in several markets.
Both operating systems have their merits, but require Google to split their focus. And yes, this is in contrast to iOS/Mac Os/watchOS/tvOS, which is a common OS divided by UI
It's gotten better, but it still sucks in many scenarios. If you need to support older versions of Android, you can't count on many of the improvements at all to help you. If you've never experienced this, you probably never did any serious performance optimization and things like performance sensitive gamedev on Android.
Come on, I run OSX and various flavors of Windows, Android, Linux, and BSD at home. Use the right tools for the right job. Windows isn't so bad and is pretty stable these days. I actually have more problems with OSX doing stupid stuff after updates or Linux murdering my hardware/desktop every few months vs. windows. My primary dev env is Linux and OSX, but I still use windows for gaming, personal use, etc.
It's not hip anymore to just rip things because they are MS, closed-source, whatever. Grow up. Every OS does many things better than the competition. Acknowledge that most of the major OS's are pretty good and use the ones that do what you need instead of ripping on them.
It's going to take some time for news organizations to get used to this brave new holding-company world, eh?
IMO it's just "consider your audience" writ large.
Alphabet's Nest, for instance, would make sense - it's not a household name.
One time I tried to nail a Google to my wall. Larry was pissed.
Had they tried something like a Smalltalk image like OS, using for example Dart instead of Smalltalk, that would be quite interesting.
Now a browser?!? All OSes already have a browser and are much more feature rich.
ChromeOS wasn't a browser pretending to be an OS, it was an OS with a browser as the GUI shell.
You can search for the title in Google search and click on the link from there, you will get to see the full story. Long live SEO!
If anything it would be probably treated like Ubuntu, an easily accessible, user-friendly distro.
But Pixel C is a pricey device. Chromebooks can be made very inexpensively. And Android would be suckey in an inexpensive laptop non-touch form-factor. I assume they have thought of this.
This will also be an interesting trajectory for getting tablet devices into business settings. It's not the response I expected to iPad Pro. I'd really like an Android-based direct competitor, which Pixel C isn't. Close, but not really.
If they do it right, it could be what Windows could have been: One browser runtime, one managed language runtime, one implementation language (or a family of them that compile to the same bytecode), across all form factors. But that "across all form factors" has eluded a solution so far. I don't blame Apple for not trying to get there first.
Part of this story hasn't been told yet. They announced it with Android, yet there is still hardware management work going on for the same device in ChromeOS. Now, WSJ is gossiping that ChromeOS and Android are merging, which would make continuing to do Ryu-specific work in ChromeOS even weirder.
Actually, it makes perfect sense, if, when ChromeOS merges into Android, Ryu (or its similar successor platform, by 2017) is going to be one of the targets for the merged OS, and some of the features of the merged OS that are important are based on the ChromeOS side of the fence.
Merging ChromeOS into Android is not the same thing as abandoning ChromeOS in favor of Android.
I doubt they'll release a convergent OS anytime soon, that'll probably be a part of Android 7.0, which'll probably be announced next June.
Today's Android. Android with ChromeOS folded into it could look just like ChromeOS, except with the ability to install/run Android apps natively.
It could also look just like Android, but with the ability to install/run Chrome Apps.
It could even be configured to look, by default, like existing ChromeOS on desktop platforms and like existing Android and handheld platforms.