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Google’s not-so-secret new OS

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Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#221

Post by iwintermute »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #82
MarkMc wrote: post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

The amount of additional code required to support Android apps on the Chrome browser would be far too great. No one wants to download a 500MB+ browser.

My Realtek sound drivers for PC were around 450 MB (!!!). Nvidia drivers are around 350 MB and update quite frequently. That's insane. And Chrome has great update mechanism.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#222

Post by reacweb »

mark242 wrote: post #87
MarkMc wrote: post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

Sun tried that, back in the day. Maybe you heard about Java applets, maybe you didn't. They were the slowest thing about the web, insecure even with a sandbox, and just an overall pain. Short of having a jvm always running on your machine, the performance of Android-via-Chrome will completely turn people off the Android ecosystem.

IMHO, the history was different. Java applets were initially secure in a sandbox and faster than what was possible with the "javascript" of that era.

Applets have become slow to start many years latter when bloated "enterprise" applications have been produced in abusive ways.

The security of applets has started to deteriorate a bit slightly before the death of Sun. It has become a security hell only since it is in the hands of Oracle.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#223

Post by macintux »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #46
gigatexal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And can a universal OS be everything to a power user and still be useful to a beginner?

Yes, for a beginner who does not need the advanced stuff, they can just ignore it right? As of now, I never use Google drive sync, I use syncthing to sync folders between mobile and my Mac. Universal OS rocks! (I hope it is in line with my vision of how the concept of universality is) I want to just visually ssh the phone and the machine, or rather the OS is in the phone and I just connect it to the machine, there wa…

I don't know why the downvotes, but your "beginners can just ignore advanced stuff" comment strikes me as naive.

Beginners are typically terrified of anything they don't understand. I used to teach computers 101 to university students, and they'd pretty much freeze up every time they saw something they weren't expecting.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#224

Post by throwawaydbfif »

flukus wrote: post #137
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you can fork. Take AMP or Android for example. With AMP, the instant you fork and change a single character of code it becomes incompatible because part of AMP is a verifier that makes sure only the official version is used with Google's cache. Without being able to serve your custom AMP pages from Google's AMP cache the entire point to its existence goes away. The reason? Typical "security". "Tampered" version…

> This was also before the Android kernel heavily diverged from mainline Linux, and before "google play services" grew from a tiny app to a framework that powers half the OS features. How diverged is it? Would the ever be merged back together?

Last I checked some devices were running mainline kernels many years old, like 2011, with zero code back to mainline. One of the other posters mentioned rampant hacks to the kernel to get things to work in stupid ways which I've heard a lot of as well.

Android is missing a ton of new Linux features on many devices and the kernel is getting increasingly unusable by ARM devices in vanilla form because of these badly done third party modifications

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#225

Post by afsina »

kyrra wrote: post #127
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that Google is trying to replace JavaScript with dart in any way they possibly can. The reason is simple, JavaScript is an open standard, dart is owned by google. Their reasons that "dart is better" is the typical google koolaid before they attempt a market takeover. As we've seen over and over with Android, chrome, and AMP especially. Google loves to make glass house open source projects you can't touch.…

Eh? Dart was trying to replace JavaScript in some fashion, but that obviously failed (they had good intentions, but bad execution). Seeing that Chrome hasn't included it yet, I doubt it will. So that dream is dead. Dart is a replacement for GWT at this point. See AdWords being written in dart now[0]. Though it's not clear now Flutter.io will play into all this (that's targeting mobile with no web target). As for type…

AFAIK, Angular Dart is used heavily within Google.

https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#226

Post by glasz »

scott_karana wrote: post #145
Inconel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow Nexus user, I've owned the Nexus One, 5, and currently use a 6P, how much of this is due to the OS versus hardware? Will Google ever be able to achieve Apple level battery life or overall UI smoothness, not to mention update support, without having their own custom SoC? I was very happy with the 5, even with the intermittent lags, especially considering it's price at release. I suppose I'm not a very heav…

Apple has had fluid UIs since the start, despite off-the-shelf, low resource Samsung SoCs. They only started making custom ones after with the 4S, as I recall.

exactly. it's not (only) a hardware issue.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#227

Post by josefx »

idlewords wrote: post #139
josefx wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember two issues with Java Applets: * Java itself was slow for a long time * The Browser would hang while loading an Applet The first is no longer an issue. They can just use a modern just in time compiler and it wont run slower than Java on Android. Chrome already has one to deal with JavaScript powered Web 2.0 applications. The second was as far as I can tell an API issue. Applets would block everything by def…

They were also completely insecure.

So were Flash and JavaScript and I still don't fully trust either. It helps that blacklisting almost everything with NoScript actually speeds up 90% of the sites I visit.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#228

Post by throwawaydbfif »

caltelt wrote: post #111
frik wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is lobbying to get their favorite syntax into JS6/7. Who wanted the class syntax? etc And TypeScript and WebAssembly are part of their plan. Ultimately, they want to recompile their 27 year old Office codebase from C/C++ to web browser.

To be fair, it seems to me like the typical webdev coming from C#/Java really wants the class syntax. I disagree with it, but I don't think it's just MS that's pushing it through, and even if it is, there's definitely an audience for it.

I've used a ton of languages over the years and vastly prefer Java type syntax when working on larger projects. The forced organization tends to lead towards some level of mandatory code clarity. Something greatly lacking in Js land.

OO is a bad word these days and functional is all the rage, even though functional languages were largely superceded by OO languages eons ago for many reasons people are slowly redicovering.

There's a huge push to put more structured language concepts into js now that it's being used for substantial projects and it's out of necessity more than convenience.

When I'm hacking together a quick Python script all that stuff gets in the way but when working on larger systems strong typing and object syntax are practically a neccesary evil for maintaining readability

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#229

Post by Aloha »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #172
thunderbong wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I wonder how many open source advocates recognize this.

Thanks so much. I get a lot of downvotes and use throwaways because of comments like this, so it's nice to hear some praise every once in a while. Google's projects all seem very inviting from a distance. Usually it's not until you're ready to implement something that you find out that you're fucked, and how. Serious ranting below but something I never get a chance to say: I'm a born skeptic and avoid the silicon val…

At the risk of down votes, I'll be as blunt and honest as you claim to be - after reading this screed - you mostly come off as a someone with an inflated view of your own importance and abilities. While I might agree with you that the silicon valley mindset is harmful - anyone who would rather keep a friendship and watch a friend go over a cliff in a barrel, isn't really worth keeping around - either as a friend or an employee.

Fighting the good fight, fighting for the things that are just, and true, and good - are nearly always worth it, the key is to back off before it becomes a pyrrhic victory.

That's a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#230

Post by michaelmrose »

therealmarv wrote: post #104
MarkMc wrote: post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

You're forgetting something: This will not work for iOS. Why develop something which excludes a big chunk of the cake? I'm happy Google is not going this way... Apple is doing already enough damage with exclusive features.

You mean the future holders of 8% of the market across all form factors?
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