Archive for July 11th, 2009

Google’s announcement only drops a few hints here and there, and the world just went crazy with speculation.

Glancing through my feeds, some comments seem to be centered around the theme “you’re just a web application peddler, what makes you think you can handle the complexity of maintaining a full-fledged OS?” (Sorry, I tried looking for references to where I read these comments but I can’t find ‘em right now).

Well, a husband and wife outfit can do it. Any other questions?

But still, the question of how would Google design its OS is a pretty interesting question. I kind of agree to this statement in their announcement:

However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era wheren there was no web.

Some may see it as a targeted broadside at Windows, but I see it more as a reflection of every single desktop system I’ve used thus far. Integration to the web from the desktop gets as far as a browser window running on your desktop and a few plasmoids/widgets/gadgets drawing on public APIs on social networking sites. At the end of the day, the mentality is still “I’m a standalone desktop, connected to the net”.

So here’s my interpretation and some pure conjecture about how Chrome OS would be designed, based on the clues they’ve left behind:

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

Nice to see that the kernel itself is still a sacred cow. Means that Google wants to remain abstracted from the hardware, for the most part. The new windowing system was a cause for concern for people seeking congruence with the status quo in Linux. Yes, if Google were to come up with it’s own “ChromeX”, it’d probably break compatibility with every single windowing toolkit in town.

It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; unless they really have no use for “windows” in its current state. Remember, Google is “just” a web application peddler. Practically every single one of their current application assets is a web application. So my guess here is that the new windowing system would be a drawing engine running on a bare metal kernel doing nothing but to render web pages as fast as any desktop system renders applications right now.

Think about it: your current desktop view as a web page? That’s already been done to death by now. Click on the shortcut to mail? A new <div> tag pops up with Gmail embedded within. The same happens for Facebook, Twitter and any other web-based app you care to remember. The thing to remember is, all these will happen beyond the confines of a browser window. The web app is your window to the world in Chrome OS.

Yeah, that’ll alienate all the traditional window-based GUI developers for sure. But think a while: is the population of web developers any smaller than that of desktop application developers? You’re swapping one developer community for another, and I can tell you a HTML “Hello World” app is a helluva lot easier than a QT one. Complex concepts such as IPC would no longer exist as we know it, replaced by a rather familiar (to a web developer) Javascript cross-domain eventing model.

And however screwed the web is right now in terms of web standards currently, is it any worse than what we have in the traditional desktop world? We’ve got Windows and Linux. And within Linux, we’ve got KDE, Gnome, XFCE ad infinitum. And none of them even look nice when you cross ‘em, if you can at all.

Some people accuse of Google of randomly throwing out toys everytime you get a haircut and not really having a strategy or focus on the bottom line besides AdSense. But if you care to look at Google’s activities recently, it does show a marked effort to push towards a common direction:

1. Google is making a huge push for the browser community to move towards HTML 5. To the extent where some are accusing them of manipulating the standards process to get what they want in. With HTML 5, multimedia capabilities would be built right into the browser engine, removing one huge blocker for having the browser as your desktop.

2. Total reliance on the Internet is all fun and games until that connection is lost. Then what?

   Says Mike Elgan. True. Then again, the last few times I was without internet access, I didn’t really see the point turning on the computer at all. In any case, Google has the beginnings of having that covered as well. Presenting Google Gears. Gears, in essence, is a caching application engine that allows you to run your apps offline (amongst other things). It even has its own embedded database.

3. Sounds like all these web applications are gonna take up a quite a bit of bandwidth. But Google is even tackling the social engineering bit now, actively encouraging web developers to make the web go faster. After all, it needs more web applications being able to run as fast as native desktop apps if it’s going to make this work.
4. Many were surprised when Google released Chrome the web browser. However, many of us quickly came to appreciate the minimalist UI, the raw speed of rendering and Javascript, and most of all the quiet elegance of it all. Even more surprises came when Google started actively pushing it to IE6 users, reminding them that they’re using an obsolete browser and they really should consider upgrading. Perhaps the powers-that-be in Google are growing impatient waiting for the old weezer to die a natural death, knowing that its continued preponderance would just delay the groundwork for it to roll out its pièce de résistance?

Now, it’s not that Google has gotten all the pieces of the puzzle in place yet, if they’re really trying for something as audacious as this. Apart from GMail and Maps, none of the other Google apps really cut it as a complete replacement for its desktop counterparts. And there’s a pretty significant percentage of the general populace who’d rather let their social security number get indexed on Bing than to allow Google to have access to all the data currently sitting on their desktops. Myself, I don’t think I’d use it either, I’m too much in love with my KDE setup right now. But it was just technically stimulating to try to visualize how the PhDs in Google would strategize something like this.

Oh. And what about games on Chrome OS? Hmmm. I don’t know, actually. Maybe Google’d just buy up Nintendo: “Here. Your Wii stick. Now go wank on it somewhere far away while we concentrate on our world domination.”

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