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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.
Here's the relevant info about Aura.
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."
*shrug* I've got a Cr-48 and I fucking love it. I have used it every day since I got one in Dec '10.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
Chrome is linux running a web browser and nothing but a web browser. Android is linux with a bastard java stack that can run arbitrary applications.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
Chrome is running on Linux too, so the real difference is whether you like your apps local or webified. With HTML5 the boundaries may be blurring. For example, many Android apps (and iOS and Windows Phone too) are actually just websites in an app wrapper.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Google should just create a customized Linux distro and infect it with its tracking tools and Google applications (gtalk, search etc.)
Apple nearly went bankrupt.
How is ChromeOS really all that different to say Android 4.0 running on Tablets?
Well, it's a full Chrome browser. (The Android browser is not Chrome.)
Chrome OS runs the exact same rendering engine as Chrome on any other platform. It also supports any Chrome extensions that run on those platforms. I've written a couple of custom extensions myself, and they run just fine on my Chromebook -- which isn't surprising, since they're just JavaScript and HTML anyway.
But if you look at it from another angle, Android 4.0 on a tablet can actually do a lot more than a Chrome OS device can. Chrome OS is still really just a browser and nothing more. This Aura stuff doesn't really change that.
Breakfast served all day!
It's an extension. ThinkGeek sells a programmable USB one with a Javascript interface.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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
Most of you people who say "there's no use for this" have probably never used a Chromebook. I have -- and though my initial reaction was not too far off from yours, I have to admit that I ended up using the thing way more than I ever expected I would.
My particular use case can be described as: "Eehhh, I guess I'll just leave it in the bedroom for when I need to look something up real quick."
Now, previously I might have done the same thing with some old laptop. But the genius of the Chromebook is that it's a Chrome browser and nothing but, so it never bothers you with anything that would go along with being able to do more than that. It never tells you there's a security fix for the printer driver, or asks if you want to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu distro (which changes the entire UI). If you have a few PCs lying around the house, you've probably rolled your eyes at least once when Microsoft's Patch Tuesday rolled around. That never happens here. It's just a Web browser that sits on the dresser.
There are security updates and it even gets new features, but it all happens behind the scenes, while you aren't paying attention, just like it does with the Chrome browser. Which is totally what you want when you really don't plan to use it for anything but browsing the Web.
Now, I'll go ahead and point out that this makes the Chromebook sort of a luxury item, because for most people who live in today's real world it's going to be a secondary computing device. You're going to buy another computer first, and then you'll buy one of these. But that's fine -- they aren't that expensive, and wasn't that pretty much the case with the entire netbook category, too?
You might say "but a netbook can do a lot more than a Chromebook, a Chromebook can hardly do anything" -- but I have no plans to do anything with it but surf the Web. Could I get a netbook and install Chrome on it? Yes, but that wouldn't be as convenient. Here, I grab it off the dresser, open the screen, and I've got a browser window. Three seconds.
It really is a pretty neat product. Google just hasn't done the best job of marketing it. Maybe that's because, unlike tablets, it looks like something you already have -- a laptop -- even though it's not one.
It may be that the price just has to come down even further. If Chromebooks sold for $199 and still had reasonable build quality, would that seem like a value to you?
Breakfast served all day!
I think someone already did that and called it Android. I wonder if Google knows their apps are being used in this way?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
This. Precisely this. I don't have to maintain this thing like I do my desktop PC, or the computers at work, and in fact I seldom have to think about anything but the user interface.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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
My particular use case can be described as: "Eehhh, I guess I'll just leave it in the bathroom for when I need to look something up while taking a shit."
That's pretty close to my use case...
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
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?
I don't know much about Android 4.0, but I have an Android 3.0 tablet and the Web browsing experience sucks on it. I can install Firefox, but it's still more complicated than the Chromebook, where I just open the screen, use it, and close it again.
Breakfast served all day!
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
This x 10e6. Agreed.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Well, it's a full Chrome browser. (The Android browser is not Chrome.)
Android 4.0 has real Chrome now.
or asks if you want to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu distro (which changes the entire UI)
Isn't TFA all about an update that, essentially, "changes the entire UI"?
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.
You can get a beta of Chrome for Android. That's not the same thing as "Android has real Chrome." Also, Chrome for Android doesn't support Flash, for one thing, so it's not the same. (Chromebooks run on Intel Atom processors, which apparently have less of a hard time with Flash than ARM chips.)
And you missed my point that Chrome OS is still a lot simpler. You don't have to launch anything. The browser is just there, all the time.
Breakfast served all day!
Isn't TFA all about an update that, essentially, "changes the entire UI"?
No. All Aura really does so far is let you run the browser non-maximized if you want to, and adds a new, chrome-free maximized window (that's small-C chrome) that emulates a desktop. If you want to, you can ignore the whole thing, run your browser maximized as usual, and you'll notice only minor changes (such as the clock, WiFi strength, and battery level being in the taskbar now).
The biggest change for me is that before, when I would press Ctrl-Shift-W to close all my tabs, I'd get a new, blank browser window. Now I get taken to the desktop. But it doesn't really matter -- hit Ctrl-N or Ctrl-T from the desktop and I've got a new browser tab/window, same as before. The "switch windows" button works a little differently, too, but I think it behaves more logically now.
That's a far cry from Ubuntu replacing your desktop with Unity. And you certainly won't get weekly update notifications telling you to upgrade your ALSA libraries and your glibc.
Breakfast served all day!
If Chromebooks sold for $199 and still had reasonable build quality, would that seem like a value to you?
No, because I already have a laptop and an iPad. Go for first-mover advantage with your next product.
My particular use case can be described as: "Eehhh, I guess I'll just leave it in the bedroom for when I need to look something up real quick."
That's what tablets are for.
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.
When Apple bought NeXT, Steve Jobs was not running Apple.... Gil Amelio was.
NO, not when you can buy tablets for $100 that would fit your use case perfectly. Unless you got your chromebook for free, you overpaid.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
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
NO, not when you can buy tablets for $100 that would fit your use case perfectly. Unless you got your chromebook for free, you overpaid.
Well yeah, I did. But where are these $100 tablets you're talking about?
Breakfast served all day!
So you paid exactly what the chromebook was worth - nothing.
Nobody is actually forking over good money for them - they are one more failure on the trashbin of history.
As for $100 tablets, how hard is it to google for "android tablet $100".
You're still better off in the long run paying for an iPad. Apple is out-spending Google by more than an order of magnitude in term of R&D on iOS vs Android, and that's not about to change any time soon, simply because a lot of the real work has to be done by the individual hand-set manufacturers to tailor it to their own hardware. So all Google actually can do is work on the base system and their own google-phone.
Long-term, the prospects for Android are just not that good - not unless the manufacturers adopt only one or two base hardware configurations - and that's not going to happen.
A comparison would be to the early days of home computing - there were so many systems, none compatible with each other - different system buses, different cpus, different hardware for everything ... and creating an OS and software for each was a zoo. Now it's a lot simpler, and even now we have problems.
Apple loves Android from a strategic point of view - Android kicks the crap out of every other competitor except Apple, Android takes the least profitable customers, and Apple takes +90% of the market profits with the rest.
From a marketing point of view, Google really, really, extremely badly screwed the pooch on this one. It may be their biggest mistake to date. Instead of buying Motorola at this late date, they should have bought it out of the gate, and launched Android exclusively on that one vendor - no license for anyone else. Moto had the brand recognition and the global scope, and the market demand for a "google-phone" was there. They could have pulled an Apple with a Googlerola phone, then Googlerola tablets, and not run into the headaches with product fragmentation and apps that run badly on too many devices. AND they would be making (much) more profits, albeit on less revenue to begin with. (Apple makes $575 per phone, google - less than $2).
Instead, the current Motorola acquisition is questionable at best - other Android partners are giving it the evil eye, and it doesn't really do much for Google except acquire a captive brand and some patents, which they would have gotten in an exclusive deal anyway.
Google needs to re-think their motto - it should be "Don't be stupid!"
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.