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Google is getting into the operating system business (again) with Google Chrome OS. Palm put WebKit at the heart of a device with webOS, the Crunchpad talked about it for the netbook, and there have long been desktop-boot-to-browser devices out there.

Google Chrome OS goes deeper:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

It is interesting that Google pre-announced this so far in advance. Google is very different from other companies, that normally hold back for a release. They instead come out and tell you what they are doing (sometimes) and promise to open source it

This is great news for Web developers of course. The Web as a platform continues to push outwards, and we can use our skills to reach more and more folks out there.

There is a reason that we won’t see the fruit of this labour for awhile though, and that is because there is a ton of work to be done. I am excited to see us all come together to push the Open Web platform further and get to a point where it can do everything we need to create compelling user experiences!

Some will say that Android and Chrome OS are totally different beasts, but Jim Pick does have a point:

Google now has two competing open source in-house Linux-based operating systems with Webkit browsers. This won’t end well.

Competition baybee.

admin chorme, google chorme, google, web developer

“Why doesn’t Google use GWT more?”

That is a question that I was asked maaaany a time. There are sites like Base and the old mashup editor and others…. but “why not something big like Gmail?”

It was always so tough because it wasn’t a totally fair question.

1. Google has some of the best Ajax hackers out there. Teams with that talent may not be the right people to use GWT!
2. A lot of sites were written before GWT was created, and migrating something is a different proposition

Google Wave on the other hand, had the chance to really evaluate GWT and they went with it. There was a talk at Google I/O about why, and some of the cool new features they use such as runAsync that does some incredibly smart things to lazily load code when needed (and gives you a much smaller initial download).

I don’t have much to add to the massive coverage that Wave has gotten today. I see two pieces. The one that most people focus on is how it looks and what the site does. It is very rich, and cool, and some people will try it and some will not like how it feels.

That isn’t the piece I am most excited about. Although it is great to reboot what a communication tool could be in 2009, but I am much more excited about the APIs. A lot of servers and frameworks and languages are vying for the “real time Web server” trophy. What Wave gives you is a federated implementation AND a spec to build your own stuff. At its core I see it as a great way API to let people collaborate on a shared object. That is a fantastic building block.

When I heard about it, I immediately thought about my own world of Bespin of course. From the initial prototype we had the notion of creating a collaborative social experience with code. One feature that has long been on the drawing board can be seen here:

We want to tie chat/status/microblogging content to files and even code snippets in a project. Imagine being able to highlight some code and see not only who created it and when, but also what was discussed. The social bar on the right has some of that concept. Then down below you see the timeline view that lets you go back in time and see the code change before your eyes. Maybe you want to replay the coding that a coworker did while you were out instead of staring at the diffs? This is the kind of thing that I hope we can experiment with Wave to do. We will see!

admin google google, GWT team

About a month ago, we covered an announcement about Mozilla’s plans to basically put OpenGL ES in the browser and call it Canvas 3D and to do so working with a new working group over at the OpenGL standards body, Khronos.

This week, we covered Google’s own 3D announcement, a plug-in offering a high-level scene graph API and embedded V8 run-time.

And of course, don’t forget about Opera’s 3D work, which we covered back in November 2007.

So now there are three approaches to 3D:

• Mozilla: Low-level, OpenGL wrapper
• Opera: Mid-level proprietary scene-graph-ish API
• Google: The full COLLADA monty

Where should the web go? Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard compares the debate to Canvas vs. SVG:

Canvas is a very simple API, much like what we’ve proposed to Khronos for 3D support. It’s well-scoped, well understood and integrates very well with other web technologies. And it’s been getting a huge amount of traction on the web. People are writing all kinds of really neat technology on top of it, including useful re-usable libraries for visualization. Have a look through Google’s own promotional site for Chrome - a huge number of them use canvas. It has traction. And we’ve gone through a couple of iterations - we’ve added support for text and a couple of other odds and ends once we understood what people were trying to do with it.

Now compare this to SVG and SMIL. Each of those specs are multi-hundred page documents with very large APIs and descriptions of how to translate their retained-mode graphics into something that’s usable on the web. (SVG 1.1 is a 719 page PDF. SVG 1.2 Tiny is 449 pages. The spec for SMIL is a 2.7MB HTML file.) We’ve seen some implementation of SVG and SMIL in browsers, but it’s been slow in coming and hasn’t seen full interoperability testing nor any real pick up on the web. The model for these specs was wrong, and I think it shows.

Chris doesn’t directly say that Google’s approach is “wrong”, but he wonders if the Google proposal of a bigger and more ambitious API would represent too great a compatibility burden for browser vendors and developers.

In the comments of his post, Henry Bridge of the Google O3D team replied; here’s a lightly edited excerpt:

We agree that to keep a standards process focused, APIs should be as minimal as possible while remaining useful, and so we would likely keep things like that out of any first attempt at a standard and, as you say, let it evolve over time. But the usefulness question brings up an important, and we think, unresolved point. We’d love to build the animation and skinning system in JS, but we just couldn’t get a JS-based animation system fast enough — even on our retained-mode API. Javascript is getting faster all the time and we love that, but until someone builds some apps it’ll be hard to know what’s fast enough.

Standardizing [an Open GL-like] immediate mode API for JS makes total sense. It’s a well defined problem, lots of people know GL, and we think it will be useful. But some of the demos we wrote _already_ don’t run well without a modern JS implementation, and moving to [Open GL] won’t help that (but we’d love to be proven wrong). That’s why we think it makes sense to explore both an immediate and a retained mode 3D, and make sure they work well together.

admin google 3d, google, Mozilla

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admin google Companies, google, picture, Ventures, Young