Google struggling to define Chrome OS as launch approaches | Hacker News Reader

Google struggling to define Chrome OS as launch approaches

venturebeat.com

11 pointsrmah7 comments

I really think the iPad threw a small monkey-wrench into Google's plans for both Android and Chrome OS. When they were both announced there was a clear delineation between mobile OS and Desktop OS; the iPad has blurred the line somewhat though it appears that the keyboard is also what ditinguishes which apple devices get the mobile OS (iPad) from those with the desktop OS (MacBook Air).

Interestingly Microsoft, Apple, and Google all have the same "problem": they each have 2 operating systems when it appears there is an ongoing convergence between "mobile" devices and "desktop" devices.

Apple has an advantage here in that the difference between iOS and OS X is smaller than that between Windows and Windows Mobile, or Android and Chrome OS. Apple is also moving ahead now that they are adding mobile features learned from iPad back to desktop in OS X 10.7.

By comparison Microsoft is still in the process of trying to figure out how mobile features look like, while Google has the problem of fragmentation of Android and not-released-yet Chrome OS. I doubt either is far into thinking about merging mobile and desktop as of now.

Is the difference between ios and osx really smaller than chromeos and Android? Chromeos is just a browser, after all... anything written for chromeos (presuming it doesn't depend on a mouse) should work on the Android browser.

Do I get extra points for actually asking that question at the Web 2.0 conference considering his answer seems to be circulating quite a bit in the news ;)

The answer is kinda hogwash anyway, since Google TV is a keyboard based device that is running Android.

For Chrome to actually not just increase the confusion around google OS's, I really wish they add an emulation layer at least for Android apps to run on Chrome OS

Google should add "native" apps to Chrome OS by adding javascript-based APIs for controlling processes, accessing the file system, etc. Essentially pitch the browser as a GUI layer on top of linux, much as Cocoa sits atop Darwin. You could build traditional apps in whatever language you wanted, but use HTML for describing their interface.

FileAPI is already in Chrome: http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/html5storage/index.htm...

So is File System API: http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/html5storage/index.htm...

And so are native apps: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

I'd love to see them go this route, especially with their new Chrome App Store and existing permissions system in-place. I'd personally always prefer to use existing web technologies to describe my interface rather than each OS' baked-in languages and frameworks. They could even add native client language support for high-performance apps.

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