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Google Announces Chrome OS, For Release Mid-2010
Zaiff Urgulbunger writes "After years of speculation, Google has announced Google Chrome OS, which should be available mid-2010. Initially targeting netbooks, its main selling points are speed, simplicity and security — which kind of implies that the current No.1 OS doesn't deliver in these areas! The Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM architectures, uses a Linux kernel with a new windowing system. According to Google, 'For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.' Google says that this new OS is separate from Android, as the latter was designed for mobile phones and set-top boxes, whereas Chrome OS is designed 'for people who spend most of their time on the web.'" The New York Times' coverage is worth reading, and there are stories popping up all over the web.
There is no mention of X anywhere, and hopefully there will be no X.
*fingers crossed*
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Chrome OS focusing on speed, simplicity and security does not imply Windows cannot deliver in these areas. It's just an alternative operating system, and has yet to prove itself. The summary sound rather, well, dumb.
I wouldn't run an OS from a company who's business is knowing your consumer preferences, but suit for yourself. I'm sure there's a positive side of this story too, but I let that to another user.
The web is not the OS. The web is...the web. I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app. Web apps work very well for certain applications, and Google has shown that they can push the limits with dynamic content, but that does not mean the web application is an appropriate model for every damned application. I don't like the Chrome browser and I don't need an OS named Chrome that is actually Linux with a lame web browser bolted on as the front end. Google does search very well, but I've hated most of their other stuff. (Google Earth is one exception) I expect no different from this.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them.
They are trying to fill a niche of an OS that boots fast and is basically just a browser. This OS will have a desktop with some online favourites... and that might be just what you need on a NETbook..!
:-)
Gmail already looks like a standalone app on Windows with Google Chrome and Offline enabled, you get a nice icon on the desktop. And when you click it it loads in a second, instead of the several minutes my Outlook used to take to even be barely useable. The choice is clear, sluggish native apps are becoming obsolete, and lightweight online apps are becoming more and more reliable. And when you only use these kind of netapps, why bother installing a bloated OS. This might just be the next revolution in the netbook industry.
On a side note: I can't wait until a new OS finally achieves the startup times of the good old trusy Commodore 64.
I'd really like to see some innovation there, much like OSX created an amazing GUI layer on top what is essentially Mach/BSD
The OS X GUI layer is essentially NeXTStep on a revised Display Postscript. It's slower and more resource intensive than X11, its graphics is targeted primarily at desktop usage. Where is the innovation?
X11 has been innovative from its inception, and it continues to be amazingly innovative today. For example, the kinds of visual effects Compiz delivers effortlessly and cleanly are much harder to achieve in OS X.
this will be a wake-up call to Gnome/KDE
What exactly do you think will be the "wake-up call"? Both Gnome and KDE have non-X11 backends, but people don't use them because there really is no benefit associated with getting rid of X11.
A non-X11 backend may make sense for Chrome OS because Chrome OS probably needs less functionality than X11 provides and it makes writing drivers easier. But in terms of innovation and functionality, X11 is second to none.
How is this going to be different from other Linux distros and associated GUI revamp projects that have sprung up promising "we're going to be better than Windows! Really!" over the years?
Because this one will be a distro backed by the marketing clout and the manpower of a 125-billion-dollar corporation. Who have clout with OEMs and governments. Who have enough drones for programming a decent printer driver or providing non-snarky support. Who have a halo shinier than Apple in the eyes of most consumers.
This will be for Linux what MacOS X was for BSD (but with more code contributed back, hopefully).
I really don't think they will replace X11. It's a stable and effective windowing system, and it also consumes low amount of resources (my N800 also runs one perfectly fine, and that's a 400MHz ARM with no GPU). It is also really powerful on appropriate hardware (with wine I can perfectly well play games of the newest generation without speed penalties). X11 is also quite uniform between Linux platforms. It also just provides the bare minimum to communicate with the hardware and display graphic primitives on the screen. The problem with X11 is that it is a very old design and an extreme pain to develop with directly because of the API 'aesthetics'.. but it would be much much harder to replace it with something from scratch. My guess is that Google will go on top of X11 and write a window manager (program that manages running windows, adds decorations, bars, icons etc..). Then tightly integrates this with their browser. Well, let's see what happens.
If Chrome OS is essentially a thin client OS build around a webbrowser... how is it any better than any other operating system?
Does it offer anything to make the web experience better than using Firefox on Linux or the Chrome browser on WinXP?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Don't be fooled by the "it's mainly for web browsing spin"? It seemed pretty clear to me. Google's direction all along has been to move applications from the desktop to the web (which in many cases, in my opinion, is a stupid idea).
Google actually states: 'For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.'
Their comments about giving developers the largest user base of any platform are complete bullshit. Web developers already have that user base and not every application should be ported to run in a browser. At first, I cringed a little when I heard that they were getting pulled into an anti-trust investigation. Now I feel better about it. I have always had an uneasy feeling about an advertising company being able to gather and broker as much information about someone as they do. For Christ's sake, they archive, search, and use your EMAIL to develop more targeted ads. The idea that my entire OS could/would gather everything it could on me scares the crap out of me.
I realize I am sort of rambling, but I have two main points:
1) Not every app belongs on the web. In fact, most do not.
2) I am not comfortable with an advertising company being so in control of all of our private data. An earlier commenter pointed out what a big "win" this would be for corporations looking to deploy thin clients. How much of a "win" will it be to have Google searching, indexing, and archiving all of your company's sensitive documentation, all in the name of building better advertisements?
Hate to point this out, but didn't somebody else already come up with an operating system that was tightly integrated with their web browser? That worked out so well for them!
It did work quite well for them. Got them to over 90% browser market share. Now if Google Search starts working slower for the other players we have a new shiny antitrust suit on the works.
Cheers!
Google has one thing that Canonical and Ubuntu even red had doesnt, broad household name recognition
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
Imagine the stereotypical average user actually having any comprehension of what you're talking about. If the average user was that computer-savvy, Windows users wouldn't get routinely p0wned to begin with.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Back when telephones were new, no-one quite knew what they were for. One company came up with a music service. This was before radio, so the idea of piping music to your home was radical. This may seem absurd to us now, but it isn't: radio went the other way. It is entirely possible that we could have built a world where we listened to high-fidelity music by phone, and spoke to our friends by radio. Even in the early 20th century the phone companies didn't get it: they ran campaigns trying dissuade housewives from chatting over the phone, believing that the technology was for Important business use (a few brief, high-cost calls instead of lots of cheap long ones).
I remember when people though computers were giant calculators. Then the computer became personal: it could do your books, teach the kids arithmetic, and keep track of your recipes. (Though why anyone you would want to keep their recipes in a computer was never clear). The hardware companies tried to sell to everyone, but they weren't quite sure how to do it: the truth is, most people had no real need for a computer.
Computer technology isn't personal anymore. It's social. The PC is a phone, not a calculator. That's why everyone needs one. That's what driving development of the technology. Ours is not the only possible path: computers could have remained high-cost devices for use by individuals to produce things or do business. But that was the path not taken. This changes what computers are.
To you, desktop applications may seem superior on the basis of their technical merits. Fair enough. Hollywood seems to see computers and the net as a new broadcast medium, like television, for which the current infrastructure has significant technical failings (privacy, QoS). In their case I hope their vision is never realized. But for many people, these visions are irrelevant. No matter the quality or polish of the applications, no matter the convenience of video-on-demand, for them the technology is technically inferior if it does not fully support communication and social activity. For them - and for me - the cobbled together infrastructure of the Web is far superior - technically superior - because for us it is above all a medium for communication.