Slashdot Mirror
Chrome OS Introduces Aura Window Manager
An anonymous reader writes "Don't look now, but Google has officially revealed their intentions to go after Windows and OS X. Chrome OS 19 has arrived for Samsung Series 5 and Acer AC700 Chromebooks running the developer channel, and the changes it brings may shock you. The new Aura window manager has landed, bringing with it a number of features that you'd expect from a traditional OS. For starters, there’s the Shelf along the bottom of the screen. It’s set to hide when you’ve got a browser window maximized by default, but you can choose to have it always on top or auto-hide, too, just like the Windows taskbar or OS X dock."
It surprises me they are still working on Chrome OS. Its probably not too bad, but I don't exactly see a huge demand for it, especially since they also have android which would work nearly as well for what they want to do with Chrome OS.
I kinda wish they pushed for Wave harder. That looked like something I would use.
Then they'll catch up to Windows 95.
Drawer?!?!?!
Here's the relevant info about Aura.
...that's what was keeping it from being a real OS...
How is ChromeOS really all that different to say Android 4.0 running on Tablets?
I guess it supports multiple windows, not just maximised only.... but is it really that different otherwise?
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I can't think of a reason that anybody would want this. just cut it out google.
if it means taking down Microsoft and I will bear their children if they take down Apple as well.
and pretty much like the default Gnome desktop on Fedora 16, which is actually kind of annoying. Been playing with it for three months and I still find it awkward.
"Don't sweat the technique."
That will run Linux. If so I am excited.
The spec for CSS 2.1 was laid down in 1997 - 15 years ago. Today, you're STILL lucky if you can get non-trivial pages to render the same on different browsers without all sorts of tricks and tweaks.
This is ridiculous. 15 years, and CSS 2.1 is still broken. At this rate, it's a safe bet that you won't see CSS 3x implemented properly in your lifetime.
People want new features, but more importantly, they want stuff that works. Web browsers are not application platforms, and the whole DOM tree concept is part of the problem. Sure, for a text document, but NOT for a "real program."
Apple has it right - people want apps, not web (cr)apps. Real programs.
We were stupid. Instead of a browser and its dependencies on servers, we could have spent the last 15 years building untold numbers of real internetworked applications. No worrying about facebook or google nosing around with your privacy ... but no, we listened to the "experts" at CERN rather than the people building graphical BBS systems complete with virtual worlds, animations, and sharable graphics, like 17-year-old Seth Hamilton back in 1993.
So go ahead and waste more time on Chrome and all that other crap - if a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the whole web "experience" is a turd that continues to be polished by committees of committees.
Apple will continue to make hundreds of billions, because we are too stupid to admit that the underlying design is really, really amateur hour, and that even a 17-year-old kid could (and did) do better.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Hey, google, do us a favor and actually do something ground breaking with your OS. Take some cues from Plan9 that were never implemented on a desktop. Maybe make it more like a network OS than a hardware OS?
It sounds like it's going to be little more than a bootable interface to the web, I know. But google does employ people that were part of the Plan9 project, so it's not like they can't do something NEW.
Also, let me not be the first to say...I hope they realize they have to respect their users' privacy on their actual hardware...(I suspect they wont.)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
This is the reason that CSS 2.1 isn't bug free yet in any browser. CSS 2 change list. It's a moving target. Granted there are some browsers with very terrible CSS support, but the CSS Spec is very complicated. Add that to the fact that most pages don't even start out with standards compliant HTML, so the browser has to guess what to do because you didn't close your tags properly, or you put a div inside a span.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Don't look now, but Google has officially revealed their intentions to go after Windows and OS X.
So creating Chrome OS in the first place wasn't enough of a clue for you?
#DeleteChrome
Apple don't make their money because people want apps. They make their money because people want Apple. It was the iMac and iPod that brought them out of bankruptcy. People want something that is easy to use and just works. They'll pay extra if it makes them look like a douchebag hipster.
What a waste of screen real estate!
So you can have perfectly-formed html and css, and it will still break. It's "broken by design" - just like we used to say about Windows. Also, no amount of back-filling is going to change the fundamental problems - html and css and javascript are not a good way to build programs, and never will be.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
For one I see better terminal type options (RDP thin clients are easy to get). However if that is what it is for Google needs to L2enterprisesupport. Google is good at many things but supporting the enterprise isn't one of them. Their idea of support seems to be "Just read a webpage and if that doesn't have the answer, ummm, don't bother us!"
Also they could, you know, market it for that if that's the idea. Being that I work at an educational institution, quite a major research university, and they've never approached us or said word one about it that doesn't seem to be what they are after.
They want it for that? Fine, let me see their pitch. What do we buy, what does it cost, how does it work on the back end, what's the supports, etc. All this is shit I can get from Microsoft any day for any level of enterprise solution, including thin-client remote access type of stuff.
"It was the iMac and iPod that brought them out of bankruptcy"
Apple never went bankrupt. And no, Bill Gates' $150 million investment didn't amount to more than a month or so of working capital - they had enough to last, but they needed the public assurance that Microsoft would continue to make Office for the Mac.
"People want something that is easy to use and just works."
Which is why they want Apple. And why, given a choice, they'll take an iPad and an app as opposed the the crapfest of browser-world on a chromebook.
It has nothing to do with wanting to look hip, and everything to do with it actually working as expected. Some people are actually embarrassed to be seen with an Apple device, because they don't want others to assume they're a poseur.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Are Barbara Hudson and Tom Hudson the same person, just with different online gender identities?
Apple nearly went bankrupt.
Google moves ever closer to gaining complete access to our personal information, and more.
Imagine a full Google OS, no monetary cost, offered under their current licenses. It's slick, clean, multi-platform, perhaps always in beta, but backed by a company with some of the best software engineering resources the planet has to offer, creating a near-perfect end user experience, all the while farming information from its users by default.
Sorry, but I'm not having any.
Paranoid? You're damned right I'm paranoid. Google scares me now more than any other company in the world. They've created a paradigm that seduces people into using their products in return for their personal information, in ever-increasing detail, all while promising that they're not evil so as to reassure them.
I don't know - maybe they'll prove themselves to be so. But if history is any indication, it's not likely, and I can't help but think that a company that exists only to gather and sell information about people will eventually abuse that in order to make money.
Cynically,
dj
Unity is the interface of the future.
Not even close. Not only did they have a lot more than $150 million in the bank, they had already returned to making a profit the year before Gates investment. Profitable companies with money in the bank can afford to do things like buy NeXT for $429 million + 1.5 million shares. Companies that are "nearly bankrupt", not so much, hmm :-)
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
And increases satisfaction in some contexts. Look at the popularity of fast food.?. "Do you want a hamburger or a hamburger with cheese on it? Maybe you want some fish shaped like a hamburger on a hamburger bun?"
A lot of users I know are sort of afraid of their complex flexible machines. (Sad but true.) And, it seems to them, just when they get used to them MS or Apple upgrades. Yikes! Of course, as you pointed out, that is exciting for a good number users (people like you and me) but a lot of people don't want to know anything about how their computer works. Quite aggressively so in many cases. "My computerz is busted!!!!! HELP HALP! "They just want to do what they want to do. I confess that this is most true of older users. On the other hand, people who grew up with computers, of course, want to have more flexibility.
It is hard to know what percentage of the overall market is savvy or slow. My guess is that the slow crowd outnumbers the savvy. That said, for large numbers of older users, and less well-educated users, a piece of cripple ware is just what the doctor ordered. Google is betting that a large number of people would be very happy to offload their admin tasks to the cloud and simply surf and communicate and do simple tasks -- especially on the road. With the added benefit that all data created on the box is safe in the cloud so loss or theft poses little risk to a persons unique information.. They will want their mobile computer to be light weight, fast, secure, simple. and bullet proof. With a little effort I have made my EEEPC netbook meet those specs. Most people can't. And they sure are not interested in learning how. Anything but.
One last comment. My observation is that Google likes to hatch several chicks and see what shakes out. Android is very free form. Lots of flavors --too many some complain -- and lots of apps. Just the ticket for those comfortable with tech. Chrome will be stable and rigid with few choices and little chance of malfunctioning. Perfect for grandma. And, as was pointed out, also useful in an enterprise setting. Chrome phone homepage Google .
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Yes. Apple, run by Steve Jobs bought NeXT from Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs didn't get any money from the purchase - that went to the investors (people like Ross Perot and Canon Corp.) He did get 1.5 million shares, the sort of performance-based incentive plan that's quite common. Grow the business, your shares grow, tank it, your shares tank.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
If Google builds the binary it is Chrome and gets bundled with the special version of the Flash Player. If you build the source it is Chromium and links to the NSPI plugin version of Flash. Kinda like if Moz Corp or someone who has entered into a trademark license agreement builds it you can call it Firefox, otherwise Iceweasel or something else has to get branded onto it.
Democrat delenda est
This is certainly the future. The only problem I see is that this future is not "now". Dataplans are currently too expensive (limited) for this to make sense.
I do not want to be locked out of all my software once:
- I go over my monthly cap.
- I leave the country (and am not willing to pay the roaming costs)
- My internet connection goes down
- Go into a rural area
I also experience hickups when travelling in the train. With my 3g i-net (in Switzerland) traveling in the train is really hit and miss. Sometimes I get excellent service and sometimes I get really bad service (and its the same train line!)
So, while I think that the future is certainly somewhere in the web, this future is still a bit off, until we fix our connectivity issues. But it doesnt hurt to have a head start for google I guess
It surprises me they are still working on Chrome OS. Its probably not too bad, but I don't exactly see a huge demand for it, especially since they also have android which would work nearly as well for what they want to do with Chrome OS.
I kinda wish they pushed for Wave harder. That looked like something I would use.
On the contrary, seems to me that Chrome OS, or more appropriately, Chromium OS, would be a perfect replacement for Windows XP to people who can't buy Windows 7 or any extra hardware to run it. Unlike other Linuxes, here they would have Google behind the thing. Actually, more appropriately, Google ought to escalate the role of Chrome OS from being just a web OS to a general purpose one, like Windows.
I do worry about things like driver support. Incidentally, is there any reason Google chose to go w/ Linux, as opposed to FreeBSD? With FreeBSD, they'd be getting a driver ABI on which to base their device driver architecture, so that things don't break as they upgrade. From what I understand, that's a lot more difficult to do under Linux. Note that here, we're talking about having Chrome supported on a wide variety of hardware unlike Windows 7 or 8 - namely, all hardware that currently runs Windows XP or 2k.
Incidentally, does Aura run on top of X, like KDE or GNOME? How would it look? The Chrome OS site hardly says anything about it. And how far is the entire OS from completion?
Is there a way to test this new Chrome OS dev release in a virtual machine, like VMware?
Picasa and Google+ Albums became one a while back, almost a whole month ago. Keep up. ;) - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Not exactly. 'Tom' is an acronym (backronym?).
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Our company train up on online freelancing on CMS Wordpress.
until it can play tf2 and run word.
Unfortunately, once companies get as large and rich as Google is now, they start to attract people who use their riches to realize projects that otherwise wouldn't stand a chance in an efficient market: ChromeOS, Go, Dart, native client, etc. Companies like Google should be asking themselves: would people be doing this at a startup if their own money was at stake? If not, it's probably not worth doing.
Does it sound like the real thing?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Hk2g9ktOw
This is a conspiracy.. MSFT is paying thousands of dollars so people write comments on this website. They must be taken down !
I totally agree on wave. I bought an invite and used wave daily until they announced it was dead. Ended up writing my own version and I use it even more.
..quaking in their boots.
Seriously, you think a third-rate "operating system" like Chrome OS is going to do anything but collect dust?
We're still building the web with what can only be called pre-Model-T artisan methods. "Every nut and bolt lovingly shaped by hand". That's full-on retarded.
A couple of decades ago, Delphi was letting people build self-contained, extensible, exchangeable components that, using the underlying framework, were often literally drag-n-drop. Java was supposed to extend that to the network, but it failed because it was slowwwwwww. And then they drank the kool-aid - "java applets". Combining the worst of both worlds - fragile web browsers and limited functionality.
Way to go, people. So we continue to make our nuts and bolts by hand, and wonder why things break? Or why a word processing program from 20 years ago, running on 1/1,000 the cpu cycles and 1/1,000 the ram, still outperforms any "web document editor" on the web in terms of both speed and features?
Web browsers - we're really into denial about just how badly they've impacted the development of better alternatives. If anyone invents a time machine, please go back to 1989 and knee-cap Tim Berners-Lee.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Concepts like the taskbar, process list, or dock are so ingrained in the way people who have computer experience think about using their systems that it was inevitable for this feature to make it's way into pretty much any user interface on the planet.
If you think of the "new" tablet-enabling interfaces, all they really do is specify a larger grid for the desktop of icons so they're easy to touch as well as click. That's the big "innovation", folks. Mouse gestures with your finger and bigger icons.
But when you dig behind the pretty new UIs down to the data that people manipulate, you realize that everything can be defined as an anchored matrix of abstract UI widgets, to be expressed at runtime by the platform the same way that the browser renders and HTML layout. You can precompile that model into system code, render it as dynamic HTML web forms with or without dynamic AJAX concepts, and use it to define pretty much any user interface.
Which reminds me -- I forgot to specify the Desktop widget hierarchy as well as the application widget hierarchy in my 2.0 BAM specifications... :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Unfortunately, their "desktop" looks like all others out there, with the exception of Windows 8.
... run Far Cry?
A recent breakthrough and the first in Southeast Asia Diseases Healing the incurable in Indonesia Nor the world, such as: HIV / AIDS, Cancer, Stroke, Diabetes, Heart and Lupus.
http://xamthone-center.com/
When Apple bought NeXT, Steve Jobs was not running Apple.... Gil Amelio was.
Hey, I support users at work and those in the early 30ties often need the most babysitting.
That is interesting. And really is what makes Google's Chrome OS play so good from their perspective. Perhaps I should have said, "People who grew up being interested in computers." And I'll concede that that number is probably pretty stable over the last two generations (as a percentage of the population.). Although maybe it is a bit larger these days due to the size of the industry and the general availability of computers. That is, people who would naturally be interested in the bits and bytes get the exposure. Forty odd years ago when I began my life-long relationship with computers they were only found in institutional settings. (Come join me on the porch. We'll sit in our rockers and yell at kids to get off our lawns.)
Then again that percentage might even be shrinking.The dumb-down trend seems to be accelerating. Smart phones, tablets and the hybrid platforms are to my mind "computing appliances." The systems in this consumer grade crippleware is pretty much inaccessible by design. Chrome OS with desktop is a natural stage in this devolution.
FYI I guy in my Linux users group was issued a Chrome book to review some months ago (before Aura) and the headaches he had trying to even install Linux were incredible. It took him a couple of days. The hardware was pretty much locked down. He managed to hack it, but it was PITA.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
From the screenshots, the aethetics and colors, transparency, etc, look pretty much like whatever-microsoft's-window-manager is called.
"It surprises me they are still working on Chrome OS"
Yea, they should stick to search and let OS design to the professionals, industry standards like Microsoft Windows 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Windows 95, 98, NT, Windows 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8. I mean just how long is it going to take Google to get it right - huh !!
"Manage strategic Chrome OS partnership with large PC hardware manufacturers and network operators". link
AccountKiller
Most people IMHO do prefer to live in prison. Only they call it their comfort zone. Perhaps you are one of the daring few who seek adventure, challenge and excitement? Oh, wait!. This is Slashdot. Prison or mom's basement? Is there a difference?
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
They should perhaps get Shuttleworth on it, if they want some really groundbreaking technology.
He'd definitely turn things around. And slap a 10-foot menu on it, that would type out terminal commands as you screamed at it. Innovate, innovate, innovate!
Defining Statistics and Social Research