Savouring Google Chrome OS

The Chrome OS from Google is one of the most anticipated of software applications that is set to come out this year. Thanks to this great article on Lifehacker, I have finally managed to savour a preliminary version of the Chrome OS.


With an install of VirtualBox, another cool tool which will be covered here soon and a customized packaging of Chrome OS, I had Chrome OS running on a Pentium 4.

In a nutshell, VirtualBox is a free utility from Sun, application that can run one operating system(the guest OS) within another operating system (the host) as if it was an application of the latter operating system.

In my configuration, I had Chrme OS running inside Ubuntu Jaunty. The disadvantage of this type of installation is that the guest OS runs much more slowly. Because of this setback, I could not experience one of the best features of Chrome OS, its speed.

However, I did get to test out Chrome and many of its features.Here are my thoughts:

If you, like me are used to a desktop, with a cool background image that houses many icons inside it, you may initially get disappointed.

As soon as you login into Chrome, you are presented with a familiar utility, a maximised Chrome Browser. You must make a paradigm shift in getting used to the idea that the browser is your desktop and all the applications you'll need are accessible through the browser. These applications include Google docs, Gmail and other Google utilities.

There are also image links to other tools like Facebook and Twitter. In previous posts, we have looked at several cloud operating systems(See Links below.) These are operating systems that reside in remote(possibly distributed) locations and accessible through a browser.

At first glance, Chrome may resemble them. However, unlike the other cloud operating systems we have seen before, Chrome OS uses HTML5, the newest version of the language of the web. While the other cloud operating systems make little use of resources on the local machine, Chrome uses HTML 5 to make use of resources like the memory and processor on the local computer.

Chrome OS is expected to hit netbooks later this year. HTC is working with Google to release a Chrome Tablet.

Below is a promotional video from Google on the philosophy behind Chrome OS>

Read more...

What does the Google phone mean to Apple?

Earlier this week, Google released the T-Mobil G1, as it announced its entry into the mobile space. The G1 release did not have half the fanfare of the iPhone, but well, one of Google's big claims to fame has always been  its unassuming nature in the technology marketplace.

From the first impressions gathered from the web, the G1 is not big on looks but features a few built in gimmicks like the search screen with a touch of a button, Googletalk, music player, maps with street level resolution and the like.

It is not as trendy as the iPhone but does that matter? Not if we look at History. Remember how Microsoft licensed out windows and  sent Apple's closely guarded software and computer almost into extinction? The facts that the Apple computer had better quality and looks hardly made a dent on Microsoft Windows sales.

Google has advertised openness as a big facet of the Android OS. This is to entice other cell phone makers to use Android on their OS. Being close guarded about its own OS has cost apple dearly in the past. 

This time Apple has to content with the added factor that Google can give them stiff competition with quality as well.  This means that Google can commoditize cell phones with superior features in the near future. How does Jobs plan to combat the Google machine now?

Read more...

My thoughts on Google Chrome

When Google announced its new Chrome browser, I was quick to give it a try. Here are my initial thoughts.

Most programmers dream of building a product from scratch. Except for the few who like the challenge of understanding existing code and enhancing it, most would like to build something from the ground up.

Building something like a browser has its advantages. One has enough amplitude to reverse engineer, enhance, learn, innovate and dare I say, steal.

If you like a feature in a certain product, you may reverse engineer it or thanks to open source, steal it. You many choose to build on it. Google has done its share of feature stealing and enhancements. The most striking on these is the tab feature which was one of the Firefox browser's claim to fame.

By examining the trails of those before, you can learn from their successes or follies. Browsers before Chrome were built for HTML pages. As the web evolved, so did they. Google on the other hand has the luxury of building a browser that will cater to not just web pages but for a plethora of applications that exist today.

Google's innovation is ingenious.

• The navigation bar at the top on the browser doubles as a search bar and searches as you type and provides you a list to search.
• It has a nice tab to preview pages you visited recently. (You just have to be careful, your spouse or parent does not have access to your computer.)
• Its task manager to examine the memory and CPU statistics to examine each of its tabs is simply a marvel.
  
• The speed with which it can access and retrieve even 'heavy' web pages is astounding
• And yes, it can seamlessly integrate with other Google applications like maps, google docs,etc.

Google has learnt from the follies its predecessors. It has kept its tabs running in separate threads. This way a memory hogging website or application cannot freeze either your computer or your browser. It can only freeze up a single tab in your browser that you could simply close.

Working with existing code may seem like a big advantage at first. As far as cliches go, your first impression may lead you to believe that you do not have to reinvent the wheel and have a lot of functionality for free.

However, as one gets deeper into prewritten code, it becomes a daunting task to understand the motivation of the person who wrote the code. This is inevitable, even if the code has been well documented.

Secondly, you may realize that you may want the end product to do things that the original programmer did not anticipate. To make it suit your needs, you may have to tinker with the code, hack it and in the process break its modularity and in the end create a maintenance nightmare for yourself, those who work with it now and those who will work with it later. The engineers at google have understood these facts and have built a browser from the ground up.

Coming into a marketplace that has been dominated by well established companies may be seen by many as risky. They bar has already been set at a high level by those before you. However, this is exactly the situation that Google thrives on. It did it through continuous innovation.

It began chasing Yahoo in the search engine space and ultimately winning that war, threw a vicious blow to Double-click with its Ad-sense technology, provided the Google Earth API to give us maps, previously unimaginable and so forth.

While many believe that it cannot displace IE or Firefox, I have faith in Google.

Google's innovation knows no bounds. Imagine telling the naive user about the advantages of multi threading. Google does this though an online comic book.

Having sung its praises so far, I must say Chrome does have its shortcomings.

• I had a problem downloading Chrome on one of my other computers. After downloading and installing Chrome, it gave me an error on startup, which was not too informative.
  
• Some website details like the honeycomb design on this one did not show up in Chrome
• As I tried to uninstall chrome on the machine where it did not work, I was taken to a page to explain why I wanted to uninstall. Besides finding this a bit annoying, its multiple choice question did not display the reason why I wanted to uninstall it. -that it simply did not work.

Well, all in all, this is only a beta version of Chrome, a preview of coming attractions and I would say that it has done its job and left the rest for the 'official' version. Many, like me around the world eagerly await the official Chrome.

Read more...