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Chrome OS, Present and Future

Posted by kdawson on from the ooh-shiny dept.

Many readers are submitting stories related to Google Chrome OS. ruphus13 points out a GigaOm opinion piece about how, if users end up rejecting its current cloud-only focus, the nascent OS may succeed as a netbook secondary operating system alongside Windows (in company with secondaries based on other Linux flavors, including Android). Engadget reviews a Chrome OS on a USB key setup that is claimed to offer eye-opening performance compared to running under virtualization. And an anonymous reader notes the 0.1 beta release of ChromeShell, which installs a "Chrome OS-like" environment that boots to the Chrome browser in ~3 seconds; users can switch to Windows later as desired.

12 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. False! by sys.stdout.write · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you read the linked ChromeShell page, it says it goes from standby to the Chrome browser in 3 seconds.

    It actually takes 30 seconds to boot, which isn't much better than Windows. Actually, is that even better?

    1. Re:False! by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny

      There ya go again ruining a good story by RTFA.

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      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:False! by gotpaint32 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Good point, I have Win 7 on a Dell Mini 10 with 1GB of RAM, it boots to the login screen in about 30 seconds and comes out of standby mode in about 5 seconds. Considering how much more it is actually loading on Windows, it seems Google still has a long way to go until instant on is a reality.

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      Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
    3. Re:False! by chabotc · · Score: 3, Informative

      Of course if you even read the slashdot summary you would see that ChromeShell is a 'ChromeOS like' type thing, and not ChromeOS at all.

      ChromeOS boots (that's full bootup and not resuming) in 7 seconds, and resumes in 3. They're working with bios firmware vendors to improve this though so boot times could become even less

  2. Useful by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If 90% of what a user does is web browsing and email, that sounds like a good bet. If you push "on" and have it up and running in a few seconds, who would bother going into Windows? You'd only need to boot to Windows when doing some office work or the like, and that boot option would be a quick-click icon. If you primarily do office work with it, then you'd want a full-blown "regular" laptop anyhow instead of a netbook.

    However, I imagine that Microsoft will find some way to sabotage multi-OS-boot options via screwy licensing and pricing games.
             

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    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:Useful by StreetStealth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't think ChromeOS will catch on as an "early boot" option any more than some of the options the BIOS manufacturers have been pitching for a few years. The benefits of ChromeOS are pretty much mitigated by sticking it on a full laptop -- you're lugging a fully-featured computer around and you don't have access to any of it, and you could get the whole thing just by waiting around another 30 seconds.

      ChromeOS is about having a bare minimum of hardware required to have a smooth internet experience. It's about the proliferation of internet access, always having something nearby that will connect you to whatever you're looking for.

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      Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
    2. Re:Useful by Stan+Vassilev · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ChromeOS is about having a bare minimum of hardware required to have a smooth internet experience. It's about the proliferation of internet access, always having something nearby that will connect you to whatever you're looking for.

      And that would make sense, if Chrome didn't require more resources for smooth experience than the majority of productivity software people use on their "full computers". Therein lies the problem: Google will have to pull a miracle to make ChromeOS run well on a device that would not run well, say, XP complete with Office, image editing software and even some casual games, or if we're talking ARM, then a light Linux distribution with more than a mere fullscreen browser window available.

      In that light, ChromeOS is not unique or slim enough to compete in its own niche, and it's questionable why computer manufacturers would prefer to sell a ChromeOS ARM netbook instead of, say, Ubuntu's netbook distribution with Chrome or Firefox pre-installed. More value to the customers for the same money.

      If Google are smart, we have not yet seen the main reason that turns ChromeOS into a desirable product. Otherwise, I guess they were simply throwing some stuff on the wall to see what sticks, as many of their other deviations.

    3. Re:Useful by Unoti · · Score: 3, Informative

      And the only reason there aren't any viruses or trojans yet is because no one uses it yet. People will write them when the user base shifts. To imagine that there aren't any flaws in the system is a sad joke in naitivity

      Perhaps you should consider reading up on how Chrome OS is designed. The argument you posted above sounds like you're applying the same kind of logic to Chrome OS that you would to any other flavor of Linux. Chrome OS is actually an entirely different ball game, and fundamentally does not let you install software on the machine. This and other design considerations make it radically more secure from security attacks than conventional operating systems.

  3. Re:need-a-subject-to-post by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Funny

    A very good idea. If I'm carrying a laptop around and I suddenly feel like looking at some porn, I can just boot Chrome instead of Windows.

    Damn, all my porn is in MS-Excel format. (How else am I going to get infinite combinations of T, A, and P via cell shuffling?)
         

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    Table-ized A.I.
  4. Re:Don't see the point.... by Huntr · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Most of my family and friends are not techies or geeks. They only use their computer for email, web/facebook and passing pics around. These are the same people asking me if a $400 laptop Black Friday deal from Wal-Mart would work to replace their (aging) desktop and they won't listen to me when I tell them to get a used one for $50 on e-bay. I'd tell every single one of them to get a ChromeOS net appliance if it were available. You said

    You are essentially getting less than what you would get with a standard distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, etc.

    We on /. often forget on there are many people who NEED less.

  5. Re:Presents and Futures by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Christmas is just around the corner, but it's not yet here.

  6. Does ChromeOS need Linux? by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It seems if you are aiming to have a very narrow and specific design to your system, a general purpose Unix work-a-like is overkill. Wouldn't a minimal POSIX-ish system with some graphical operations be sufficient. It's great to use something familiar and actively developed like Linux. Just for the device drivers alone it is pretty valuable. But after digging into the Plan9 kernel, I realize that most of these drivers are not really that complicated if you can accept a basic level of functionality and less than optimal level of performance. (like the nvidia drivers in Plan9, it's only one short .c file, and just enough to get 9wm up and going). Even something like L4 is overkill, a lot of the cool abstraction it offers is probably not necessary if you can just wedge it into a library.

    Many of us on here have hacked together little pseudo-kernels. Glorified Hello World bootloaders really. If you had a TCP/IP stack, using an existing one like KAME or uIP, or a new implementation (I don't care which) and a filesystem that is more like a simple memory mapped key-value pair database (using critbit, hash table, b+tree, whatever). it seems to me that would be enough to get something like WebKit going.

    What value would a custom kernel/OS have over a specialized Linux? Well I think you could focus on implementing abstractions most suitable for a browser instead of trying to fit a filesystem or sqlite library to your design. Mostly I suspect you could optimize the boot of a very primitive system pretty easily. And you could do things where isolation of the browser in memory can be done in a way much finer grain than the Unix scheme of dividing everything into a user process or kernel mode thread.

    Perhaps the browser would be more like a root user, but individual tabs would have permissions controlled by a kernel or hypervisor that would be in isolation of one another. One page may not be able to hijack the rest of your browser or access cookies or passwords unless specifically authorized. And it could be done in such a way that is still relatively fast and low overhead, but more secure than current schemes.

    Imagine if plug-ins like flash and video codecs had to run through a socket or some fast IPC messaging scheme. where you could just close it to force the process on the end to shut down.

    Why don't I implement it you ask? Well assuming I have the skills necessary to do a good job, and the ambition to complete such a task. I'm too old school to accept the idea that a system where the only application is a browser is useful to me personally. Maybe when kernel development becomes browser based?

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    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire