Slashdot Mirror
Google Planning Web Browser?
Kick the Donkey writes "John Dvorak has just posted a very interesting, albeit hypothetical, analysis of Google's future directions. Citing the 'unusual' hires of Rob Pike (from Bell labs), Ben Goodger, and Darin Fisher (both from Mozilla) and the acquisition of the gbrowser.com domain, Dvorak speculates that a Firefox based Google browser and Google-OS may soon be coming to a cluster near you."
D'oh. I copied the wrong URL.
The last Slashdot article about Google browser speculation is here.
You know, because we've discussed this news before? Four months ago? Some would say it's basically a dupe.
A browser is one thing and apparently the only thing the evidence supports. Why the jump to a Google OS?
Because Rob Pike was the developer of Plan 9 at Bell Labs. His hiring by Google would imply they are looking to develop their own OS. Microsoft is trying to push in on Google's territory, so it makes perfect sense for Google to push in on Microsoft's territory.
Since whern does MS not advertise on the desktop. When you installed 98 there was an icon for AOL. You did not have AOL but that icon was their to let you know that you could get ite easily.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
According to "whois gbrowser.com", the domain was created almost a year ago (2004-Apr-26), so, being true, this is a long time plan...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Before the google search engine, the best we had was keyword index based lookups. Google blew the rest of the search engines out of the water with pagerank and the sheer genius of indexing by linked popularity.
Perhaps not a new idea in the world of scientific papers (where the number of papers referencing yours is the primary success indicator) but certainly a new idea when applied to the web.
If you don't think that counts as "new", then I challenge you to come up with a single example of something new.
Page 7 of 10-Q (Page 12 of the PDF) lists the following revenue sources for the nine months ended September 30, 2004:So, out of their $2.1 billion revenue in nine months last year, just $35 million was from licencing their "very very good technology" and the other $2.1 billion was from advertising
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Actually, you should think about the "browser OS" concept slightly differently.. the object is not to recreate a client OS on the user's machine, but to, rather, create an environment on the user's machine that easily aggregates and can be targetted by the server the user accesses. The day of "my app only knows about 'this' machine" is over. The compelling thing now is to be able to easily write applications that span multiple machines, or that are even machine independent... thing about it... do you want to perform whatever your job is in isolation, or do you want to just DO you job, which most likely involves others? And if it DOES involve others, do you want to be bothered with the intracacies of how the machine you use manages those dependencies? Basically, the idea of "OS" needs to radically change... sure.. it's still a usefull abstraction for a single client, but for "rich client" browsers or whatever they eventually become, the conventional idea of "OS" is insufficient. Just my $.02.