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Introducing the Google Chrome OS

googleblog.blogspot.com

121–130 of 180 posts

Re: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

#121

So effectively your PC becomes a Google ThinClient. Got all the Office Applications with Google Apps. Email/Communication with Gmail. The rest of the web. Multimedia with YouTube/Hulu/etc. Sounds like what majority of the people need. Even for work environments, would be pretty good (you can offer your proprietary application in the form of a web application).

Add NaCl for heavier apps and a NaCl'd VDI or similar client and there's really nothing you can't theoretically do given enough bandwidth.

Re: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

#122
post #41

So effectively your PC becomes a Google ThinClient. Got all the Office Applications with Google Apps. Email/Communication with Gmail. The rest of the web. Multimedia with YouTube/Hulu/etc. Sounds like what majority of the people need. Even for work environments, would be pretty good (you can offer your proprietary application in the form of a web application).

I'd enjoy replacing the "instant-on OS" partition on my notebook with this.

What I want is a good enough "instant-on" that it's my only partition, and I no longer have to worry about hibernation or sleep mode ever again. Have orthogonal persistence for everything, so I never even have to save. Just open the clamshell, or hit the on button. Something comes along to distract me, I snap it shut, take care of whatever it is, then open it up again, wait a half second and continue on where I left off.

The ideal laptop/internet pad would behave like the Nintendo DS, if the DS could hibernate, and not just sleep when you close it.

Re: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

#123

I couldn't help thinking about the crunchpad when I read this. Slap this on a tablet with a hybrid display and you might have something very interesting.

Slap a Pixel Qi [1] screen and a capacitive (iPhone) touchscreen on a Crunchpad and I at least will line up for one.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawX3wenxNc&feature=relat...

Re: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt it will be a windowing system optimized for showing exactly one full-screen "window", and perhaps occasional modal dialogs. I believe both Qt and GTK+ can be compiled to draw directly to the Linux framebuffer, if you don't want to use X (although they don't exactly provide much in the way of window management).

Yes, they can, but it is not as robust as X. Now and then you have to reboot the whole OS to reset the windowing system.

Is there anything better than X to render stuff to using Qt?

Re: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

#125

I personally would never trust google with something as important and all encompassing as my OS. I value my privacy far too much for that, and seeing as how google collects usage data for just about every action you perform on services they offer, I'm not sure i'll ever go the google way on desktop software.

Google knows who my friends are (Contacts), what I'm saying to them (Gchat/Gmail), where I'm going (Gmaps), what I'm reading (Reader), what I'm writing (Docs) and what I'm looking for (Search).

As far as I'm concerned, operating systems are pretty interchangeable. The things I care about are already all going through Google. Does anyone besides Google offer a similar suite of apps? The only one I can think of is Apple's MobileMe.

Re: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

#126
post #53
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a Mac user, you can also download the latest nightly build here: http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-ma... (scroll all the way down to the latest build directory) And yes, it is wicked fast . On my system, it doesn't even bounce in the dock before opening. It just opens. Plugins aren't supported yet, but I just open any sites that require Flash in Safari.

It's so fast OS X is unable to register it as a recently launched application for the magic folder in the dock... Anyone knows why?

Just a guess, but maybe the weird process-per-tab thing.

Re: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

#127
post #125

I personally would never trust google with something as important and all encompassing as my OS. I value my privacy far too much for that, and seeing as how google collects usage data for just about every action you perform on services they offer, I'm not sure i'll ever go the google way on desktop software.

Google knows who my friends are (Contacts), what I'm saying to them (Gchat/Gmail), where I'm going (Gmaps), what I'm reading (Reader), what I'm writing (Docs) and what I'm looking for (Search). As far as I'm concerned, operating systems are pretty interchangeable. The things I care about are already all going through Google. Does anyone besides Google offer a similar suite of apps? The only one I can think of is Appl…

How about Outlook/Thunderbird/Facebook (contacts) + Yahoo (mail) + OpenStreetMap (maps) + Sage/Friendfeed (RSS) + Zoho (Docs) + Bing (Search)?

While no-one may be offering a similar suite of applications, if you want to use them you can find different services that do.

Also currently even if google does know all that information about you, it doesn't know what files you have on your hard drive. In my opinion, giving carte blanche on data on my hard drives to google is a big no for a company that doesn't give two hoots about the privacy of their users.

Re: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

#129
post #66

I'm not sure if I like implications of a web-centric OS, especially when its producer is as rich and powerful as Google. I see the market for it, and I think it will be a huge benefit for the average user. However, I see the transition from desktop-based software to web-based as a loss of user control. Today, when governments decide that mp3 sharing, porn, articles of political dissent, or news from non-national sour…

Can I call alarmist bullshit?

I think the inevitable consequence of fears like yours is that you'll be able to pay different institutions, so that you can store part of your data here, and part of your data there. So that you can surf behind company A's proxy most of the time but use company B's when you feel like/need to.

Yes, there are going to be less entities on the whole. But if the internet keeps growing, that might be a temporary setback--the infrastructure is going to hopefully become more spread out, more resilient to attack, and more designed to protect individual rights, and individual property. Think about it this way: as we move more and more pieces of our lives online, the value of our digital "stuff" grows higher and higher, and systems to protect that stuff, and our hopefully our constitutional rights (including the right to privacy), will appear.

At the very worst, you can always wait for some kind of massive privacy or fiscal (or even just data loss) tragedy would at least cause governments to act quickly to more clearly define the rights of an individual online :p

Re: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

#130
post #118

Does anyone have any guesses on how this might be different from Android?

See the comments about Android in the Google Blog post.

Android: Aimed at small-screen, low-power devices (handhelds, set-top boxes, MIDs, netbooks). Java-based application development. Touchscreen-oriented UI.

Chrome OS: Aimed at netbooks, laptops, desktops. Web-based application development. Browser-based UI.

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