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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."
The last article about Google browser speculation is here.
...is for Google, if the browser news is true, that they base it on Firefox and INCLUDE all extensions people add to Firefox in the browser's installation script. Of course these should be [installation] options.
No, they aren't.I mean come on! We already heard about these rumors a loooong time ago. It's not true. Stop posting about it.
Le français vous intéresse?
If anything it will just probably be a "Google Linux" distro...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Blake Ross, in his blog, had some insightful commentary that I didn't see mentioned here on Slashdot:
Google's interest in Firefox shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. At the end of the day, 90+% of Google's users are accessing its service through the browser created and controlled by its largest competitor. Would you feel comfortable if customers had to walk through your competitor's shop to get to your own? This is really what Firefox is all about from a strategic standpoint, and this is what "it's just a browser!" naysayers are missing: he who owns the window to the web owns the web. When there's one porthole on the ship, everyone has to look through it. Firefox seeks to add more portholes to make sure people really understand what's going on outside.
If they're planning an entire OS to make codifying and searching your data easier, I can't see that happening anytime in the short-term. After all, awhile back there was a shoot-out of desktop search tools, and the Google Desktop Search wasn't top-ranked (yet).
- shadowmatter
Google could also roll out a thin client service in which you do everything within any browser window connected to Google. Google could host user accounts that go beyond email and search. A person could browse through the google browser, manage their googlefiles, run googleoffice, send gmail, buy stuff through froogle, etc. It would be a totally portable thin client service.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
An operation system by most accounts that I have heard is the program that handles devices, files & filesystem, processes(process manager), and I/O(input/output).
Processes written in JavaScript and/or a server-side language, I/O through the browser interface, files through WebDAV, and how is a web UA not an operating system? This is what scared Microsoft into adopting its anti-Netscape strategy.
What's next - google hires a plumber - the end of IT as we know it?
l fabfinalproject.htm
No... It's perfectly obvious what that would mean:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~paulo/courses/howmake/m
This would be a trivial thing for google to do, and I think its where they are heading. If they release a browser, look for them to shortly thereafter release a web based office suite (that only works in their browser), or possibly a web based vnc viewer type app (again that only works in their browser), then they can sell desktop apps over the web, charge a monthly service fee, you get 10TB of storage on google's cluster, you get access to the compute power of that cluster, you have access to it anywhere, everywhere, fast and easy.
This will be the death of MS, but as other posters have said, it is scary as all hell. Google is a nice company now, but this kind of power concentrated in 1 companies hands will prove horrible for the net.
How does Firefox assign and keep track of memory? Last I checked, it used system calls, which are part of the OS.
How does Windows or Linux put your computer to sleep? Last I checked, it used ACPI calls, which are part of the BIOS. In the case of browser-as-platform, the host OS (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, etc.) assumes the role of a BIOS. Replacing the BIOS with something a bit more powerful could eliminate that middleman altogether.
Isn't Google the new Microsoft?
Has Google done anything new? Not really. Much like the early Microsoft, they simply take existing ideas and improve them. Google wasn't the first search engine. They weren't the first webmail provider. They weren't the first web site that searched Usenet (in MS fashion, they bought deja). Even Picasa, which they bought, is being transformed into a PC version of iPhoto.
Based on their past history, it wouldn't surpise me if they were to boldly attack Microsoft on browser, OS or even on an Office-type product.
It seems reasonable to me that, by hiring these guys, Google is going to build a competitor to MS Office that runs within a (Mozilla-based) browser.
Consider that XUL has a lot of the capabilities that let users get a good UI in browsers. Consider also that Google already has zillions of hefty servers dotted around. If they extended XUL as required and created e.g. GoogleWord, GoogleExcel and GooglePoint, users could create and store their docs in a secured, always-there backend similar to that used by Gmail. Imagine logging into Gmail and having all your documents stored with your email, labelled (as for Gmail messages) into one or more categories and searchable - I can see that being very attractive for many people.
Yep, there's obviously a few bits missing:
- MS Office document compatibility (but is that such an issue if Google can change user's work habits such that people exchange pointers to GoogleOffice docs rather than the docs themselves? Maybe all they need is an MS Office import/export facility, which reads/writes docs in MS' published XML format from a server located in a country that is suitably patent-free...)
- something to allow documents to be embedded within other documents (wonder what percentage of MS Office users actually use this)
- XUL would need beefing up in terms of capability
- 100 others...
Still, given Google's deep pockets, I don't see these issues as insurmountable. Given that (IMHO) 90% of MS Office users only ever use 10% of MS Office's functionality, a sort-of WordPad on steroids may be enough to get a critical mass of people to switch to using GoogleWord provided they solve other MS-Office-centric issues such as document management on PCs, viruses/spyware and so on.
Just curious, does anyone have a list of predictions made by John Dvorak which turned out to be true?
[o]_O