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Pixel Picture Clearer? Google Ports Office-Substitute To Chrome OS, Browser
CWmike writes "Google confirmed on Tuesday that it has ported part of QuickOffice to a technology baked into Chrome OS and the company's Chrome browser. The popular iOS and Android app substitute for Microsoft Office that Google acquired last year will run using 'Native Client,' a technology that lets developers turn applications written in C and C++ — originally intended to run in, say, Windows. With that it will execute entirely within a browser, specifically Google's own Chrome. Google claims that Native Client code runs almost as fast inside the browser as the original did outside. QuickOffice viewers come bundled with the $1,300 Chrome OS-based Chromebook Pixel notebook, and Google will add editing functionality in the next two to three months. Does this all make the Pixel make more sense?"
No.
Google figured out that a computer that runs only cloud based stuff isn't such a good idea. But, since Chrome OS doesn't have native apps, they had to hack those native apps into Chrome, where they run "almost as fast" as they would if they were proper applications under a real OS. As a demonstration of how great this technology is, Google hacked an entire open source office suite into Chrome.
That certainly does explain why you'd want to buy a Chromebook that costs more than an ultrabook or an Air.
It almost sounds like Google wrote the summary... except for the use of annoying cliches and the incomplete sentences.
If it weren't for the MS tie-in, and it was truly an open standard, wouldn't it make more sense than trying to string together HTML and JavaScript in clever ways to accomplish the same thing?
Why is "stringing together HTML and Javascript" a bad way of doing things? Really, for these UI-type things, most development models involve you creating "things", stringing them together with "actions" and (possibly) changing the way they look with a "skin". Why is using HTML to define the things, javscript to define the actions, and CSS to describe the skin, a bad idea? Is there a different language for one of those functions that you think is more appropriate to that particular domain for some reason?
In short HTML+JS+CSS are rapidly (relatively speaking) converging on the capabilities of Flash/Silverlight - and bringing some of their historical strengths (accessibility, separation of content and style, human-readable data formats, open standards, etc) to the table as well. I mean, doesn't Flash even now use a Javascript dialect for its scripting capabilities?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The big difference between ActiveX and NaCl is that the latter has a sandbox - a very smart one, actually, which lets it run native code directly while remaining secure.
The other big difference is that they are also tackling the architecture portability issue by the PNaCl project (basically downloading LLVM bitcode and compiling it for the current architecture).
So, yes, this is like ActiveX - but done right. All the perf of native code with none of the security issues.
I really, really hope it catches on - especially PNaCl. If it does, we can finally ditch JS as the web client language, and move on to something more decent (and better yet, you and me can make different choices about the languages that we want to use).