Introducing the Google Chrome OS
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
This may not seem like an issue right now, because there is still choice. But with Google pushing a web-centric OS, I think within a decade, many people will have a hard time choosing something else, much the same way they had a hard time choosing something other than windows until the last five years.
Maybe I’m just a Big Brother fearing nut, but I don’t like where we’re heading.
That being said, I still use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Analytics, and other services. So I'm not exactly avoiding the apocalypse here.
Being forced to use Windows at work could be considered nice in comparison.
I don't think that anyone at Google set out to be evil. But power corrupts and the legal systems and governments have not exactly struck up a fight for privacy for the individual the last couple of years.
I don't think that anyone at Google set out to be evil. But power corrupts and the legal systems and governments have not exactly struck up a fight for privacy for the individual the last couple of years.
I also see scenarios where Google never becomes corrupted by power, but by government mandate a la Patriot Act is forced to reveal content. I don't like that there appear to be many plausible ways where the whole situation could end up generally bad.
Unfortunately in the digital age, it is hard to achieve any semblance true security for your personal information without acting on what lay-people perceive as paranoia.
What we probably have to worry about is that the base level of privacy that is easy to achieve is in freefall. The incentives for any individual organization are too strong, because of the level of service (to consumers or advertisers or whatever) can be so much stronger. It seems to me that compounding this is the fact that the 'digital age' makes monopolies natural in alot of places, even if only for a short time.
We're already rapidly adjusting to a loss of privacy, and maybe it's a necessary progression and privacy advocates will one day be a quaint historical footnote.
Even so, I'm definitely in the paranoid camp, and if we don't make a conscious effort to have a more active cultural attitude towards privacy, we might not be able to preserve any of it if we have a collective 'oh shit' moment down the road.
Already governments are openly leaning on google to get it to do their bidding, who knows what is happening behind the scenes.
I think the inevitable consequence of fears like yours is that you'll be able to pay different institutions, so that you can store part of your data here, and part of your data there. So that you can surf behind company A's proxy most of the time but use company B's when you feel like/need to.
Yes, there are going to be less entities on the whole. But if the internet keeps growing, that might be a temporary setback--the infrastructure is going to hopefully become more spread out, more resilient to attack, and more designed to protect individual rights, and individual property. Think about it this way: as we move more and more pieces of our lives online, the value of our digital "stuff" grows higher and higher, and systems to protect that stuff, and our hopefully our constitutional rights (including the right to privacy), will appear.
At the very worst, you can always wait for some kind of massive privacy or fiscal (or even just data loss) tragedy would at least cause governments to act quickly to more clearly define the rights of an individual online :p
Constitutional rights? Right to privacy? The government can listen in on any phone conversation they want (wire, cell, voip...), read any e-mail that gets sent, break into your home if they would like, et cetera. What rights do we have exactly?
Power corrupts. It's human nature. Your trust in the government to not abuse its' power is scary to me.
In a world where the OS market is fragmented, centralized control and opression becomes even more difficult than it was in a desktop-centric world where one OS had huge market share.
Now that's not the case if we end up with one web-centric OS, but I don't see that happening any more than I see Bing taking over 65% of the search market without any response from Google.
If netbooks continue their meteoric ascent, and if Chrome OS grabs a significant share of the market, we may finally see the realization of the mythical Year of Linux On the Desktop. The ironic aspect, of course, is that even though a large number of non-technical users will finally be running on a fully open-source platform, they will use it to run applications whose workings are even more opaque than traditional closed-source, client-side apps.
I wonder what role, if any, Native Client will play on these devices. I understand Native Client to target only x86, but I find it difficult to imagine Chrome OS -- Google's first direct challenge to Windows -- not being able to run Native Client applications.
Can anyone explain to me, what is worth downvoting about it? Thanks.
I regularly killall npviewer.bin too, when Flash is hung or doing something weird. Reload the page and it restarts.
Whether Google wants or needs it is another question.
We will never forget.
Got all the Office Applications with Google Apps. Email/Communication with Gmail. The rest of the web. Multimedia with YouTube/Hulu/etc. Sounds like what majority of the people need. Even for work environments, would be pretty good (you can offer your proprietary application in the form of a web application).
The ideal laptop/internet pad would behave like the Nintendo DS, if the DS could hibernate, and not just sleep when you close it.
So who copied who?
> The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.
Google's approach to licences is far more nuanced than blind adherance or avoidance of any particular licence.
I'm not denying that they're doing it or anything, I just can't imagine why they'd bother.
Android: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/100221.html
Palm Pre: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/111453.html
"...overall the Pre has the appearance of being a well-engineered distribution. It's recognisably Linux in a way the Android isn't."
In other words I don't think they care too much about gpl stuff since they built their own UI and bytecode interpreter where most of the action is anyway...
Instead, I'd be really impressed witha good windowing systems impemented using the canvas tag, something like:
I believe both Qt and GTK+ can be compiled to draw directly to the Linux framebuffer, if you don't want to use X (although they don't exactly provide much in the way of window management).
And on the up side, it's nice to be able to run a GUI app remotely, though I'll agree that that's not winning over too many desktop users.
In the past 3 years X has improved tremendously. I recommend anyone check it out for themselves.
As far as I'm concerned, operating systems are pretty interchangeable. The things I care about are already all going through Google. Does anyone besides Google offer a similar suite of apps? The only one I can think of is Apple's MobileMe.
While no-one may be offering a similar suite of applications, if you want to use them you can find different services that do.
Also currently even if google does know all that information about you, it doesn't know what files you have on your hard drive. In my opinion, giving carte blanche on data on my hard drives to google is a big no for a company that doesn't give two hoots about the privacy of their users.
I don't know if I buy the claim that Google doesn't give "two hoots" about your privacy, as long as you don't count selling contextual ads as over the line. But anyway, my point is that the "files" I care about protecting are already with Google. For true protection of your local files, on any operating system, encryption is your only answer.
And if google did care about my privacy why read all my mails, and keep track of every webpage i visit from their search engine. I don't buy the "we'll only take a peep, just for advertising" logic.
Also, google already having all the files you care about would be more an exception than the norm. I would presume a majority of people keep their files stored on their hard drives.
In my opinion, keeping track of my actions in any way goes against google's self stated "don't be evil" policy. Or did Paul Buchheit take that policy with him to friendfeed???
Microsoft knows who my friends are (Messenger/profile), what I'm saying to them (Messenger), where I'm going (Bing Maps), what I'm writing (Office Live), and what I'm looking for (Bing). Granted Office Live is a beta and there is no Microsoft-branded online feed reader. But a lot of the checklist is covered.
If you start checking off every box, you'll find that Yahoo has a fairly similar total suite of properties, too. Google just has the most mind share.
IBM did it in the 1960s and 1970s with the entry point being a highly skilled personalized sales force in an era where relationships established the trust needed for enterprises to commit to large systems.
Microsoft did it in the 1980s and 1990s with the entry point being its proprietary API for its desktop OS which, with the help of OEM hardware partners, it used to choke out anyone who sought to compete with it in the desktop applications market. It then tried (and failed) to use its desktop monopoly as a vehicle by which to dominate the back-end of enterprise computing.
Google now seeks to gain similar supremacy with the entry point being superior proprietary products ultimately derived from or at least capitalizing upon Open Source in a web-centric computing environment. What form this will take, I don't know. But it will take a form by which Google tries to seize and maintain control of the entry point and ultimately bend the world's primary computing environments to its proprietary advantage. The Chrome OS is one piece of this effort.
The question is one of which company will become the ultimate gatekeeper to all or most of enterprise computing, which is where the money is. Google wants that role and that is where its fight with Microsoft will lie.
As they say, "The law of human nature - it ain't been repealed yet."
Wave, by its nature, will obsolete or radically transform, many of Google's existing web apps: gmail, docs, blogger, picasa, calendar.. anything related to communication or collaboration. Yet, it seems as though they've gone to great lengths to make Wave decentralized, even as far as open sourcing their server implementation. They've done this even though a silo style Wave app would likely be a huge success anyway. I can't fathom why they would allow Wave to exist if they were hoping to control everyone's data, as it clearly represents a threat to the control they already have.
I'm not dropping my guard, but at this point my best guess is that Google is just trying to create an open and fair web ecosystem, in which they will compete based on their momentum and massive resources, and in which their major competitors lose their existing advantage. Either that, or they don't have much of a plan at all and the company is really just a bunch of smart people doing cool stuff with a huge pile of money that fell from the sky.
Slap this on a tablet with a hybrid display and you might have something very interesting.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawX3wenxNc&feature=relat...
I really hope they try to go big -- bury ALSA cleanly, use Skia for all drawing as vectors, and have an event model intended for Cocoa/WPF/GTK# (not the crapulence of Xt).
Google has a chance to leap past that, because they've contrived a situation where they not only don't need X, they don't need to port X apps.
http://www.gilder.com/public/telecosm_series/software.html
It's taken 14 long years -- and it's Google-Chrome-plus-Javascript rather than Netscape-Navigator-plus-HotJava -- but the browser has finally become a complete alternative to a desktop OS.
The article's final sentence: "In the age of the hollowed-out computer, the king of the desktop rules an emigrating empire."
General purpose computing device, or a Google Terminal? That's your choice.
I get the impression they are trying to repackage their cloud services together: it would make sense if the plan for Chrome OS is to ultimately tie it all together.
I assumed that "windowing environment" meant "window manager" not "GUI toolkit" anyway.
http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-ma... (scroll all the way down to the latest build directory)
And yes, it is wicked fast. On my system, it doesn't even bounce in the dock before opening. It just opens. Plugins aren't supported yet, but I just open any sites that require Flash in Safari.
Anyone knows why?
I think it doesn't bounce for a different reason. For example, Firefox doesn't bounce when it autoupdates. Everything should bounce for at least one time in normal conditions.
The only way you can fully configure the browser is still trough running gconf-editor for some parts, and configuring Firefox and then importing settings from there.
That being said, my biggest issue with the current chromium builds is that performance is truly horrible and majorly unstable. Sometimes things just works, snappy, as expected. But in more than 50% of the cases when opening a new page the entire browser locks, for what can be periods of up to 5 to 10 seconds. Wasn't process isolation supposed to fix this?
If this browser is going to be the "OS" for the web, in it's current state its closest equivalent would be Windows 3.11.
IMO Firefox 3.5 is a much better browser, while peak performance being somewhat slower, at least it performs predictably.
Wow - completely opposite from my experience. What are you running on? I'm on Ubuntu 8.10 right now, using the nightly builds.
I've had a tab lock up once or twice, but in general it's very nice, way faster than FF 3.0, and pleasant to use. The key bindings are the only thing that seems a bit wonky, but I'm generally happy and at some point may start using it as my main browser, if FF 3.5 isn't significantly better.
My biggest issue is how the latency of the browser seems to vary between milliseconds and two-digit seconds. Performance is randomly varying over three orders of magnitude and that kind of performance instability is worse than performance being consistently "slow".
As for Firefox 3.5: It is much better.
Though you'd think if they're announcing a linux-based operating system, centered on their web-browser, making their web-browser run on linux would be trivial. OTOH, could it be the diversity of linux distributions that's making it difficult for them?
I do hope they prove me wrong. But based on their past performance, I am not holding my breath.
Also: Google, if you're reading this, please at least make the typography render properly in this OS. You've already failed at this with Chrome, which has some of the worst antialiasing I have seen in a browser (surpassed in crappiness only by IE).
I am curious to see how they deal with this stuff.
At least that is how I'd do it. Just type config:wifi in your location bar to change your wifi settings. Visit config:files to browse your local files, etc. Of course, all of these can be bookmarked by default so the end user can click rather than type.
Chrome already does stuff like this with about:memory, about:network, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About:_URI_scheme#Google_Chrome...
I don't think that Google Chrome OS would be suitable for most corporate shops that are generally Microsoft centric (and have been for quite some time). I think this free OS will be geared towards light users that primarily use their computer for surfing the web and checking their email.
It sounds to me like jeffspost is over generalizing and suggesting that Google Chrome OS will only succeed if it's embraced by large corporations. The software hasn't even launched and jeffspost has already figured out it's "one missing piece".
They are launching it as a netbook OS for a reason. Netbooks is a loose term. I'm not exactly sure what the line is, but one definition might be a small laptop that doesn't replace your main computer.
I daresay that whoever buys this will either have another computer or have no need for corporate apps.
Taking another view: any Java app can be an applet (if you take care of things like access to the file system). Therefore, we already have then, since Eclipse and Netbeans can be an applet, and thus a web app. Theoretically, anyway. :-)
jeffspost notes a startup opportunity: webapps for creating webapps (actually webapp clients, but that's less memorable)
They don't need application vendors to target Chrome OS in order for this to be a success - the whole point is that it just runs web apps, period.
Its targeted at consumers and netbooks, not those that want to run heavy duty, CPU-intensive applications. The whole idea of a netbook is to be small, light, quick, and primary a web browsing device.
There's games, obviously, but what about a NaCL port of iTunes? It's not that far-fetched.
I think we can expect very close integration of Native Client into the Chrome OS as soon as or right after it goes public. To the level of accessing hardware ports to control external devices right from your Native Client web-app.
Imagine drivers that get loaded and updated on-the-fly. Of course, Google will have to implement a smart security mechanism (along the lines of RSA authentication for dynamic device/driver coupling) and provide a way for device manufacturers to register their driver's public keys with Chrome OS.
ISA translation tech is already widespread: a company called Transitive has been quite successful in offering translation products for Unix vendors who have needed to transition their customers to a new architecture (most visibly they provided the PPC->x86 translation engine for Apple's "Rosetta").
With Native Client, the translation ought to be made easier by the structural limitations that are imposed on NaCl modules primarily for security purposes -- to use a natural language analogy, it's easier to translate a text if you know all the words originate from a certain dictionary.
(Joke. Please don't downvote me again, I'm already at -5.)
If you look at what people do with a Mac, they do far more than just using web application. Far Far more.
Stallman & Co. foresaw this (at least) a decade ago. He's right to be worried. The real issue is: what are rights in the digital age? Who has control of what?
I might not back everything he's done. And he sometimes dismisses technical issues as trivial over political ones unnecessarily. But he is having the conversation at the right level of abstraction.
We'll keep facing the pitfalls of centralized power until we collectively decide to kill that beast permanently.
All I use it for is browsing and light coding on the move. Windows, and the likes of Ubuntu Netbook Remix are all too 'big' for that.
It sounds like the Google Chrome OS is exactly what my netbook needs.
I've seen web-based ssh clients, and someone might be able to write a web-based vnc / remote desktop client, but I can't see it being useful for offline coding.
None of my websites (that I would edit on the netbook) are business critical / make money / have any real world importance whatsoever. I can log in via cpanel, roll out some coding amends live and worry about breaking things as and when it happens.
The real player in the future of netbooks is very likely Apple, not Google, because any netbook running OSX will also be able to not only run all the usual OSX apps but Chrome too...
Google cancelled cl33n's AdSense account 8 days ago, right before they were due to make their first payment. The site and its small traffic & AdSense revenue hasn't changed for 2 years (am working on an update now, I got kinda busy with a startup ;)). If cl33n did Bad Things then it's been doing them for 2 years now. I wonder if Google will refund the money to the advertisers?
I've appealed but have not received a response from Google. I still don't know what cl33n did to incur Google's wrath.
Does this mean an operating system that runs chrome and little else or an operating system that runs mostly chrome?
This is the kind of competition that I would like to enjoy (i.e. between products that both belong to me). I wonder if it actually will work out for them, and if so, how I could use that strategy myself.
That would be fantastic to have a OS to handle all web related activities for general users.
Android: Aimed at small-screen, low-power devices (handhelds, set-top boxes, MIDs, netbooks). Java-based application development. Touchscreen-oriented UI.
Chrome OS: Aimed at netbooks, laptops, desktops. Web-based application development. Browser-based UI.
By that definition I can remove all my apps from my Vista laptop except the browser and what do I get, an IE OS?
That's silly!!!
What is Windows? It's that thing, in the background, that lets you run all the applications you want to run.
But what if all your applications were written in Javascript and HTML, and had URLs instead of .exe files? With all the extra power built into Chrome, they could still write to file systems, store data, work offline, do sophisticated graphics and parallel processing -- these are not hypotheticals, this is what Chrome can do right now. We're just beginning to scratch the surface of what an app written from Chrome can do.
Chrome can be an OS, for some value of "OS".
When the iPhone was first released, development was restricted to web apps and they didn't have access to any API. The fact that it was javascript and HTML was mostly tangential to the complaints of people who wanted to install (and sell) local apps, with access to the unique hardware, though obviously existing Cocoa coders, 3D game programmers and anyone needing to get close to the metal weren't going to be happy even if these other elements were taken care of.
On the other hand "fart apps" and things that are basically light wrappers round existing web apps have no such problem.
See the Palm Pre for someone taking this to it's logical extreme.
I'm reminded of the time when Chrome came out and Arrington flipped: "z0mg it's a cloud operating system!1! the future is here!"
If they want to do something useful, make me a command-line that supports images, links, etc and gives me an easy way to process XML.
It's not only the Chrome OS thing. Google Apps out of beta could mean that Google is serious about competing in the groupware segment.