Google Chrome OS Screenshots? | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome OS Screenshots?

mashable.com

46 pointspeter12329 comments

I believe these are fake. Chrome OS is not in beta -- Chrome for Linux is in alpha, and Google releases betas. Also, the maximized window with all that white space is bad design. My expectation is that Chrome OS will look like a maximized version of Chrome the browser with task management inside of the browser window instead of outside of the browser window like in these screenshots. Though I won't be too upset if these screenshots are real.

Looks like it doesn't include support for taking screenshots…

According to google, the Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux kernel and a new, simple window manager. I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. I guess maybe it will be packaged as a consumer appliance in a way that Linux hardly ever has been.

Let's not forget that the Chrome Browser and therefore the Chrome OS will come with a lot of HMTL5 features build into the browser.

This will enable a lot of cool applications to be built that can be run on very cheap and efficient OS/Hardware combinations.

<sarcasm>I know, very exciting I don't think any browser other then Chrome will have HTML5</sarcasm>

Don't underestimate the power of simplicity.

Simplicity is worth a LOT of fuss.

If I can't use it as a programmer's workstation as well as a simplified desktop, its of no use to me. I realize their target audience may be thin consumer devices, but if they want good stuff dev'd on it, developers need to work directly on it as well. Time will tell.

"... but if they want good stuff dev'd on it"

I think this completely misses the point. Applications are web apps. You're not supposed to dev for the OS.

Edit: formatting

nope, wasn't missing the point at all.

Imagine if you will, I'm developing a webapp. I want to target ChromeOS users. I could run a separate VM to test on, but no, I want to dev and test on one system for the most part. I want my app framework stack and all the tools running on this thing and use the web browser to look things up on localhost, right.

Also, if this is to end up being a good open source citizen and google doesn't expect to do _all_ the work, developers need to be able to work on the platform as developers and not use it remotely to test and debug.

Thats' what I 'm talkin' 'bout ;) I get the whole HTML 5 and Web 2.0++ thing.

For testing you use Chrome on a real OS.

I probably didn't make myself very clear in the last post.

Lets say ChromeOS gets put on netbooks and is a solid option compared to a Windows 7 or Linux netbook. Am I, a hacker, going to use such a device? No, I have more to do than just use webapps. So as a hacker, its of little interest to me unless I can also use a good subset of linux dev tools.

Right, so iphone and android devs develop directly on the phones, otherwise there wouldn't be any apps...

I see your point now, thanks for elaborating. As it stands, I use my desktop for dev work, which I wouldn't think of putting Chrome OS on, but, I still am eager to put it on my laptop.

Uhm...it runs linux.

cd emacs && ./configure && make && make install

yes, but it may not resemble the linux you've come to know and love. they've already said that it has a custom window manager, i.e., not X11. so who knows what else they've left out.

X11 is not a window manager. X11 provides the low-level API for drawing to the screen and for interfacing with input devices. Metacity (GNOME), KWin (KDE) etc. are window managers. IIRC, X11 does offer a very basic window manager, but nobody actually uses that.

A new window manager shouldn't be a problem. If it behaves properly, you will hardly notice the difference.

It will actually be interesting if they manage to replace X11. AFAIK, many people hate X11 to the core. Heck, the Qt and KDE developers refuse to work around X11 bugs, hoping that pressure from users will somehow cause the X11 devs to fix them. Of course, I don't know the full situation, since I stopped paying attention to politics in the Linux world a while ago.

yeah, i know that. but if they took out X11, then it stands to reason that all the standard window managers went with it.

Yes, X11 does come with a very very basic window manager.

It's been a LOONNGGG time (I switched to windows XP) since I have had to install one, but I believe you can see it by by taking

     exec $foo

out of your x11rc, then running startx. Right clicking will get you an xterm, and you can launch things that require a GUI from there...

What seems funny to me about these screenshots is that even though they appear they are on a desktop computer, if you look in the bottom corner of one of the screens you can see what appears to be a battery meter(as you would see on a laptop).

But who knows, maybe its just a laptop hooked up to a monitor...

That looks like a new BeOS. Nice.

To me, the idea of running applications in the "cloud" on JavaScript and HTML is the total opposite of a new BeOS. BeOS is supposed to be lightweight and highly responsive. The Web is not. That doesn't mean that ChromeOS won't have its uses, but any other modern OS will get you closer to BeOS than this.

Not really true. I think Gears is a clear indicator of how Google sees the post-HTML5 world. Given that I think one of the driving ideas behind a ChromeOS is that programs and data will be cached to some extent on the desktop (a view that seems to be shared with Adobe (AIR) and Microsoft (Silverlight))

Web apps that are cached should be both light weight and responsive

Compared to BeOS, Web apps that are cached are in no way lightweight and responsive. Maybe we're defining lightweight and responsive differently. I am thinking about the real-time media capabilities of BeOS which let you drag around videos on Pentium IIs. I'm thinking about native C++ applications and a completely multithreaded system. I'm thinking about Gobe Productive and native e-mail clients. For me, lightweight runs on a Pentium Pro with 64MB RAM.

Gmail is not lightweight. Compared to Yahoo Mail or Live Mail, its design is airy, and it's well-optimized. Let's be honest: Chrome OS is only here to tap the netbooks. It's not going to revive the massive amount of old hardware that BeOS could use. YouTube isn't lightweight. Chrome's process-per-tab system isn't lightweight.

Web apps can't hope to achieve the kind of responsiveness BeOS offered, at least not for a few more years. Unless you have near-zero network latency and multithreaded JavaScript apps, you cannot possibly build responsive web apps. We will get there, sure, but it will take a while.

BTW, I know this because I use Haiku on my PC. Haiku is responsive because it has been built to be that way from the ground up :)

seems very similar to the current chrome 3 developer's preview which changed the start page last week to one without a sidebar as in these shots. seems like they're preparing to use this space for something more sophisticated.

Fake.

Real!?

I'm not sure. It depends whether they'd use that kind of monitor at Google!

Having said that, all you'd need for a Google OS would be:

   +Vesa VGA drivers up to big resolutions
   +Ethernet/Wifi drivers (these are pretty much standard these days)
   +Keyboard/mouse/sound drivers
   +A web browser

That does not look like a standard-issue Google monitor, but maybe it's a test machine with very low specs. Not unlikely considering the target market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com