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Comment by JoelSutherland | Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks just run a browser. Windows runs a browser and other things. Even if there aren't that many other things, your comment is fundamentally wrong.

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Except that browser also has apps:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/home

I love how the most prominent app on the official store's homepage is a blatantly copyright-infringing Sonic the Hedgehog game.

http://grab.by/gRs8

You can run Chrome (and all Chrome webapps) on Win8.

but can it on Surface/Windows RT? I haven't checked back in on that for a few months, but my understanding is that they still won't let you run JIT compiled code unless you're built into the system -- aka Internet Explorer 10 or the CLR.

Firefox and Chrome will have Metro versions on x86, but will have to interpret JavaScript under Windows RT, and V8 doesn't have an interpreted mode.

Too bad the Surface currently for pre-order is ARM and thus runs Windows RT. An x86 version with Windows 8 should come later, but will likely be more expensive. Chrome won't run on RT unless it is in the Microsoft store.

On WinRT you can't. Microsoft won't let the JavaScript interpreter do JIT on it.

So you can run them they'll just be slow? And could Chrome Frame be modified to run Chrome apps in IE at full speed?

Edit: just to be clear, without VirtualAlloc() and VirtualProtect(), you can't really run any JIT. No LuaJIT, no PyPy, no Java. No Scala, Clojure, or jRuby either.

It may be possible, Google may opt to release Chrome on it (or someone may port Chromium) but the lack of an optimizing runtime will probably make it suck when compared to IE.

Yeah, V8 doesn't do that. Meaning the effort to support Windows 8 RT will/would be large and possibly with little reward.

Chrome could use the IE10 JavaScript engine presumably (depending on how easy it is to hook native APIs back into the rendering engine from JavaScript).

I never said you couldn't? The point is that to call Chrome "just a browser" is misleading.

The comment you replied to said "Chromebooks just run a browser. Windows runs a browser and other things." The fact that Chrome (and Firefox) can run apps doesn't change that.

It doesn't change that distinction, but it does render it pretty meaningless.

$250 for a browser, with a metal/plastic shell.

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