Develonizer

I’ll admit this right up front, I could completely be missing the whole point of ChromeOS. I’m not in communication with any one over at the googleplex, I don’t know any dev’s that are spec-ing this out, so it’s quite likely that I’m completely wrong.

That said, the way that I read everything coming directly from google is that you get enough underlying linux to enable the hardware, run a local webserver and a browser, thats it. Chrome (the browser) becomes the only UI layer, just like Gnome or KDE, and because it is a browser it can talk to the local server and the outside world. Every user application then is nothing more then a call to the local webserver in another ‘tab’ of the browser. This allows you to leverage HTML5 and CSS for display, JS for logic, and add in a little sugar to give you access to a SQLite DB and file system, *tada* a toolbox to solve just about any standard desktop app. Also because it’s a browser theres no reason that remote calls to existing services like gMail are built in. Thinking of things like this allow you to see how they can say things like every app will be crossplatform compatable because all you need to do is host your app on another server and *wamo* it works on any copy of firefox because it’s just HTML5 and JS with access to some data store.

So that’s how I see things, but it seems like everyone else has missed the boat. It seems that there are two camps of confusion.

ChromeOS = Cloud + thin client

If this is indeed what google has up it’s sleve, it doesn’t seem like a very good move. There are so many privacy concerns that come up when any one thinks of the cloud, and thats not going to go away by the time that this gets released. Even worse though is that this line of thinking implies that the device will be useless with out a connection to the cloud. What use will any device be if it pushes everything out to the cloud with out any local storage and then that line is cut? Even a simple cellphone is useful enough these days to play games and check a calendar when there is no cell service.

ChromeOS = Desktop

If you have to ask if your browser is going to get his with a virus then you’ve been stuck in the windows mind set for too long. Will there be code exploit holes, sure, but there no diffrent then any other browser issue. We run our browsers now, and no one seems to care so how will this been any diffrent.

So I’ll say it again, I could be wrong, Google could be investing alot of time and money in to building up something to compete with X and any other UI layer on linux, or they could just run there browser and be done with it.