Misunderstood Chrome OS

At first, I though the false beliefs about the new Google's OS were due to a temporary misreading of Google's plans.

But at the moment writing, even the rare IT experts who positively welcomed Chrome OS persist in propagating even more wrong beliefs about it. To name a few:

• Chrome OS is a "crippled OS" / a "toy OS" / a "secondary OS"
• Which could NOT run Photoshop or WoW
  
• Which depends on a network connection to run
• Which can't compete with regular OS for non Internet centric use cases.

Chrome OS is not more dependent to internet than any recent OS.

To make a comparison, the computer I used to write this blog combines regularly updated binary Linux packages. As a whole, one may see this software as a local mirror of a remote Debian repository. My firefox browser may also been seen as a local copy of some Mozilla's ressources.

On the other side, Gears and now HTML 5 allow a web application to be fully mirrored and runnable in a local storage.

Is there really differences? all these software are updated when a connection is available, except than web based technologies make this process more open (any domain can be a software provider), more secured (same domain confinement), more structured and fine-grained (data base) and generalize it to both uploading and downloading and both application code and user data.

Please note Gears is already a several years old technology, now superseded by HTML 5 local storage features. Both Gears and HTML 5 are fully integrated to Chrome browser. It means nothing prevents software developers to design applications 100% featured offline.

I think one doesn't even need a network connection to install such a web application as I suppose you could install it from a "file:" URI pointing e.g. a plugged SD card. You understood well: Not only Chrome OS applications could run without a net connection but they could even be "installed" offline.

Chrome OS can run anything.

What a web application will be able to do at the date Chrome is available? Well, as a matter of fact: _everything_. Thanks to HTML5 last additions, the Canvas element,  JIT compiled Javascript,  O3D, and last but not least the very promizing NativeClient concept, any existing desktop application can be ported as a web app.

• For example, your preferred MMORPG could be replaced by  as an O3D/JS app, seconded by a NativeClient framed IA and physic engine.
• People often cite Photoshop as THE application which will never be available on Chrome OS. On my own, I don't see why it could not be cloned as well. Simply combine O3D, Javascript and NativeClient framed image processing native code.

Chrome OS is not a crippled OS.

According to me, Google is achieving the most consistent, secure and easy to hack applicative framework ever made, while being lighter and as much efficient than any classical software stack.

Google is not (yet) like Microsoft but...

Saying "Google is like Microsoft" gets more and more trandy. But remember how open Google API are. Standard API are always privileged by Google even when they conflict with a former Google's proposals (HTML5 vs. Gears). Most of the Chrome OS software is released as Free Open Source Software under the Chromium brand-neutral project.

Even if Chrome OS also features a form of trusted computing, I'm confident with the fact that the end user will be able to bypass security checks and even install an alternative OS. Why? Because Google is neither a software nor an hardware authoring company. It's a SAS provider whose long-term strategy consists in removing all the mess between their services and their users, especially closed software on mobile and wired devices.

However I'm OK complaining about how Google is centralizing and mining our user data. As long as Google deals with ads, no problem. But at any time the Google's architecture could be high-jacked by some governments or corporations to make 1984's world a truth.  This is clearly a "single point of failure" in human rights protection.

My idea is that we can make personal data accessible from anywhere without storing it "on the cloud". The solution consists in self-hosting SAS at home with low-consumption hardware. This is the necessary condition to sanitize this new software architecture Google has built for us. It pleads for a complementary software stack providing self-hosted services at home. HandBaller and Entrelacs could contribute to it.