151–160 of 180 posts
The real player in the future of netbooks is very likely Apple, not Google, because any netbook running OSX will also be able to not only run all the usual OSX apps but Chrome too...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I enjoyed your narrative.
i agree with you. the comment with the large number of votes is a fearmongering comment, while the comment that you are referring to is actually a technical comment (the kind that i think is more relevant at HN).
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…
If ARM and x86 are targeted, this means no Flash (not surprising, given how poorly it runs on Linux), which presumably means YouTube will be operating in full-on HTML 5 video mode by the time these devices launch. If netbooks continue their meteoric ascent, and if Chrome OS grabs a significant share of the market, we may finally see the realization of the mythical Year of Linux On the Desktop. The ironic aspect, of c…
Linux making it to the desktop by essentially ignoring the Desktop paradigm? Oh the irony.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has already indirectly "extended" Native Client with native 3D graphics using their O3D API ( http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/ ). It's just a matter of time until someone codes up a library to expose that API through JS interop in Native Client. I think we can expect very close integration of Native Client into the Chrome OS as soon as or right after it goes public. To the level of accessing hardware ports to…
But will Native Client work on ARM?
ISA translation tech is already widespread: a company called Transitive has been quite successful in offering translation products for Unix vendors who have needed to transition their customers to a new architecture (most visibly they provided the PPC->x86 translation engine for Apple's "Rosetta").
With Native Client, the translation ought to be made easier by the structural limitations that are imposed on NaCl modules primarily for security purposes -- to use a natural language analogy, it's easier to translate a text if you know all the words originate from a certain dictionary.
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…
Microsoft knows who my friends are (Messenger/profile), what I'm saying to them (Messenger), where I'm going (Bing Maps), what I'm writing (Office Live), and what I'm looking for (Bing). Granted Office Live is a beta and there is no Microsoft-branded online feed reader. But a lot of the checklist is covered.
If you start checking off every box, you'll find that Yahoo has a fairly similar total suite of properties, too. Google just has the most mind share.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if people will be able to take this new windowing system and use it for their own purposes. That would be fantastic, if the new windowing system is good.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problems like crashing my browsers 10x a week, and using 50x the CPU that mplayer uses to play the same video.
Running it using nspluginwrapper seems to make it so that when Flash crashes, it doesn't take Firefox down with it. I regularly killall npviewer.bin too, when Flash is hung or doing something weird. Reload the page and it restarts.