Chrome OS update adds Google's hardware-accelerated Aura UI | Hacker News Reader

Chrome OS update adds Google's hardware-accelerated Aura UI

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58 pointsaeurielesn26 comments

I had a chance to play around with it and these are my thoughts:

It's definitely pretty. The animations are fairly smooth on the Series 5, which is surprising because the Atom processor chokes on a lot of big websites.

Unfortunately I don't think this greatly helps your productivity while using Chrome OS. It's more convenient for having multiple windows. Perhaps if you were doing some writing in Google Docs you could have 1 window for your writing and research, then another for when you want to take a break. That makes sense. However it seems, and I could be wrong on this, that when you open a new app it opens in a tab within whatever window you were last using.

It feels like something that was designed purely as a "how do we abstract away windows management" and not about usability. They need to do something to make apps be real apps, meaning no tab chrome at all. And they need to intelligently find a way to do that. So perhaps apps launched from the home screen will default to launching in a new window without any chrome, and they would need a good way for multitasking from there (the auto-hide bar is a fair start).

I really don't get why ChromeOS should exist .. wouldn't an Android tablet with a keyboard (e.g. Asus Transformer) be a much better choice?

Google started work on ChromeOS before Android became successful in the market and long before it arrived on tablets. Additionally, I don't think Google really wants everybody on an OS that runs native apps. Their speciality is the web. Their money comes from the web and the more time people spend searching and browsing the more money they make. ChromeOS is probably what they wish everybody were using, but they aren't going to ignore Android's success.

They'll keep building ChromeOS to hedge their bets. They can't risk getting shoved out of the OS game in any way.

I would have agreed with you if this was the Google of 4 years ago, but I think the faction of the company that thinks web-first is either gone or silenced. Android has the worst support for web apps as first class apps of any of the major mobile OSes.

They were just bizarrely slow in porting Chrome to Android. With Chrome on Android, the Chrome Web Store follows.

Google profits off ads in apps and app sales. If anything it increases their ad market which is good for them.

Oh, Android is extremely good for them. But it's an eggs-in-one-basket deal and Chrome OS helps that.

I had a chance to speak with a Google engineer about this not long ago. They said that Chrome was meant to be cloud-centric, whereas Android focuses more on Apps. (A bit of an oversimplification, but generally accurate.)

My take: ChromeOS may actually be better for Google's interests in the long term. However Android's success has resulting in significantly more momentum currently. The release of Chrome on Android might be an effort to move Android more in line with Google's larger goals.

ChromeOS is based off Linux. Android and Linux are going to merge. Chrome is coming to Android. It's not hard to see imagine some interesting collision scenarios and user experiences.

Once Chrome becomes stable on Android and it replaces the stock browser, I don't know why you'd still want ChromeOS on a separate device, or say even dual booting with Android. Would there really that huge of a security advantage to do that, instead of simply running Chrome from Android?

Because besides the security issue, I don't see any advantage at all for ChromeOS in that scenario. And even so, the convenience of having Chrome in Android most likely trumps whatever security advantage ChromeOS has over Chrome on Android.

You could probably boot and shutdown ChromeOS 10 times in the time it takes Android to boot.

Heck, you could boot and shut down Windows 8 in the time it takes Android to boot. (I'm using the consumer preview just now, it's very fast)

Which is not very relevant on these devices that get rebooted maybe once or twice a month.

True. The main issue with Android is sporadic latency that still affects GBP600-ish devices (the GC kicking in?), which ChromeOS manages to avoid.

ChromeOS/Chrome Web Store seems to be about countering the the trend towards "appification" (the consumption of the web through native clients) by turning the web itself into an app store and giving websites native abilities.

Android is Google's take on the appification model. While there's overlap in that Android has a Chrome browser, I think the distinction is that Android's interaction model means that native apps will be primary method for navigation for the forseeable future since the native Web app model doesn't translate cleanly on a touchscreen device.

The Web is essentially Google's Desktop OS, so it has a vested interest in keeping it alive. ChromeOS is a way of accelerating that process, since the closer it gets to becoming viable alternative to an OS running native apps, the closer the web gets by extension. Creating a standalone OS allows them to frame the problem better than just Chrome browser, since a host OS always has a slight masking effect, even if the observer is aware of it.

Chrome OS and Android will merge at one point.

http://www.silicon.com/technology/software/2011/02/16/androi...

>Unfortunately, early-adopting Cr-48 owners are out of luck — the build of Chrome OS in question is only for Acer AC700 and Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks.

I found this quite funny considering the Cr-48 owners got them for free.

The comments on that article really make me appreciate hacker news. I had forgotten how bad internet comments could be.

The terminal, which used to be a full screen affair has been missing from the last few dev builds (haven't tried this one yet so I can't say if it is back yet). But being able to use it alongside a page I'm working on would be great. Maybe someone who has given it a try can chime in.

Also, Does anyone know if this has any snapping/splitting/keyboard support (a la TMUX/Awesome WM/StumpWM)?

Supposedly it's back now/recently (I haven't tried either): http://www.chromiumosforge.com/2012/04/crosh-is-back-google-...

Gave it a try and it is now inside a tab, and works pretty well.

* ctrl-w tries to close the window, which meant I needed to remap "change window" in vim from ctrl-ww...not a huge issue, but it was an annoyance. Ctrl-v is ctrl-shift-v so they seemed to get some things right, but not all ChromeOS is pretty bad about key remapping, I'm still holding out for a way to change ctrl-h to backspace (as God intended it) instead of this useless history being brought up.

Enjoying the rest of the update, there are in fact split screen snapping (and the ability to resize both open windows at the same time). here's hoping for keyboard shortcuts (I'm not holding my breath).

Dumb question: so is this just a lightweight X11 WM or is it a brand new windowing system? Or just some sort of directfb hack-job?

Judging from the wikipedia page it says it's a new WM but looking here: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/platform/window... there's clearly some bits borrowed from x11.

It's not just a new X WM, though we do still use X (at the screen level). Basically, we render everything inside the X root window. It's all composited, using the same compositor we use for web content ("CC").

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura <-- somewhat old, but you can get the gist.

ChromeOS used to have an X window manager (which is what your link is pointing to, the code used in M18 and earlier). The cool thing about the new code is that it runs in Chrome, so it's much easier for more engineers to test and develop for, and it's also platform agnostic (since the only X interface is at the host layer). This means Windows developers like myself can work on ChromeOS WM features since I can effectively build and run the ChromeOS WM on Windows.

Wow, that's a really cool idea!

Hey wait, could you do that in Metro? Then we could have "Chrome OS" inside Windows 8...

It's a new windowing manager.

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