dop’s blog

It’s the hot topic of the month, Google’s new browser Chrome. I’ve used for some time and I kind of liked it. I wasn’t thrilled by it. The interface is nice, it feels faster than Firefox - but I am still hanging on my Seamonkey. There is a lot of information around the web concerning Chrome, I’m sure that all of you have read at least something regarding it.

I’d like to stay in a few points:

1. Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine is fast [1],[2]
2. Has really easily applied security features (incognito anyone?)
3. Has its own task manager [3] and is trying to be as robust as possible [4] - making it hungry for memory and quite heavy.
4. It has a very simple interface, almost depraved from anything [5] and does not support extensions - that means no widgets a la Opera, no add-ons, plugins, ActiveX etc. Just a plain browser.
5. It is fully open, with a well organized open-source community that will guarantee the browser’s continuous development.

One could think that OK, Google just wanted a browser so that they don’t need anyone else’s to operate their business [6]. Maybe not quite…

From my point of view, Google Chrome tends to look more like an operating system than a browser. It has thread and process management. It probably has also a really good memory management or will have in the near future. It has a fast Javascript engine that is being optimized and in the Web2.0 era that could easily be a GUI shell. It is minimalistic, as minimalistic as an OS should be.

What if instead or reinventing the Web and the browser, Google is trying to reform the whole world and force us into finally accepting Oracle’s and Sun’s vision, the Network Computer? But in a form that would now benefit Google.

We have cloud computing: Amazon’s S3 for storage, Google Docs for office application, YouTube for video distribution (and maybe movies in the future?) and a lot of others (Google Calendar, Gmail, Gtalk etc.) What we don’t have is a way of having all of these apearing on our screens as REGULAR applications - most people will only be convinced that a web-based application is actually serious if it looks as a regular application.

And here comes Google Chrome, which has a lot of features that a runtime system (or an operating system) has. And probably it will get more. All it needs is a minimal kernel and device drivers for the most trivial tasks. Then we’ll start seeing machines that have only a Google Chrome instance in place of KDE, Gnome, Aero or whatever else is out there in the market.

Google does not need a GoogleOS based on Ubuntu. It needs just a browser.