Google Chrome

[drplokta]

There's something that no one is mentioning with reference to Google's new web browser. Which is that if you read what the comic says about the browser, that's not a web browser, it's an operating system.

It has a programming language (Javascript). It has a filesystem/database (Google Gears). It has process management. It has window management and display logic. It has permissions-based security. This is not Google trying to compete with Internet Explorer, it's Google trying to compete with Windows -- or rather, make Windows irrelevant.

Comments

Irrelevant Windows

[fiat-knox.livejournal.com]

Hear hear.

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

Um ... quite a lot of people are mentioning it on the blogs I read.

[aca.livejournal.com]

Remember, The Network is the Computer (tm)

Maybe it'll work out this time...

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I guess they've seen all the vitality in the Firefox addon market and want to pull independent developers into working for them. I'm certainly a fan of the Firefox approach as its cross-platform and the tools can be installed at user level. Not sure I'd be nearly as keen as a sysadmin though, with all the users installing a rapidly diverging toolset.

[andrewducker]

Not so much The Operating System as Yet Another Layer You Can Build Applications On.

It's more like, say, Java in that respect - build your app once, and it runs on any PC. Not that that worked for Java.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I'm seeing this as a way of pushing HTML5 through Candidate Recommendation without too much bother.

[erikvolson.livejournal.com]

Not an OS, unless we can boot it on bare hardware.

If I need Windows to run Chrome, I'm not really competing with Windows.

[drplokta]

But you can't boot Windows on bare hardware, either -- you need a BIOS. You don't care which BIOS you have, because they all work and don't contribute significantly to the user experience, and so BIOS developers have no pricing power.

If Chrome does what it should, and your apps move into the cloud, then the OS will be in the same position as the BIOS is today -- you've got to have one, but you don't care which one you have, so you might as well have the cheapest one.

[ajshepherd.livejournal.com]

Lots of IFs, and this whole cloud thing seems to me like so much NetHype 3.0!

[brooksmoses]

Except that, now that the hype about Java's write-once-run-anywhere has all died down and people have moved on, it turns out that in fact it actually did work for Java enough to be useful in practice for a number of things, even if not enough to hit the ideal.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Haven't we been here before?

(And that one comes from a family tree going back to Ken Thompson et al ...)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Nothing new under the Sun ... *cough*

I remember back in '95, Netscape promising much the same sort of thing: "The OS doesn't matter so long as you can run our browser on it, and you then run whatever you want on that."

[andrewducker]

Oh absolutely - we use Java Webservices at work, and they're great.

I'm just remembering that when Java first appeared we were told that there'd be Java Word Processors out soon that would run everywhere. And I don't see them.

I don't expect any one tech to take over :->

[andrewducker]

One programming language is, to put it mildly, not enough. And Javascript is certainly not good enough.

They'll be competing with Windows when OpenOffice (or equivalent) runs inside the browser. Oh, and World of Warcraft.

[drplokta]

Well, they're working pretty hard on the OpenOffice equivalent with Google Apps. I'll admit that graphic-intensive games are an issue.

One programming language may or may not be enough, but it's all you get on a Windows PC. The language, of course, is x86 or x64 machine code. Anything you write in any other language gets compiled to machine code. Google have software right now to compile Java code to Javascript, and there's no particular reason why the same couldn't be done for other high-level languages.

[andrewducker]

Google Apps are good for what they are - but they're still incredibly simple compared to Word. I do hope they improve though.

It'd be nice to have other high level languages compiling to JavaScript - but I'm not sure how efficient, in general, that double-compilation step will be. Compiling down to the new VM would be more efficient, but then you'd be constrained to only Google's browser.

And unless Google get massive traction for Chrome (like over 90%) it won't matter, as you won't be able to rely on people using it as their browser - you'll still have to deal with IE, Opera, Firefox, etc.

[armb.livejournal.com]

> Google have software right now to compile Java code to Javascript

And a compiler for Javascript to machine code (p. 15 of the comic), though how many platforms that will eventually work for I don't know. x86 would be enough for many people, but if it's going to be on Android, they might do iPhone and/or Windows Mobile too.

But Googling, it appears that the current Android Java VM (Dalvik) has no JIT compiler, so maybe Javascript won't either.

[armb.livejournal.com]

http://code.google.com/apis/v8/build.html says V8 (the Javascript engine) is available for ARM based Linux already.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/04/chrome_review/ starts "This is not just a browser: it is a vehicle for delivering web applications", and compares with Adobe AIR

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

My first thought on hearing that Google had a web browser was whether it would run in a web browser. Get that to work and THEN you'll be able to do away with the OS!

I'll believe it's made the OS irrelevant when they port Google Earth to it, which I doubt very much was written in Javascript.