bobpeers -> blog

You can read the full story on Engadget or the Google page, but here’s a few screen shots taken from my HTC Desire.

If you don’t have the Android navigation app installed just download it from the market.

It seems everyone has an opinion on the Google Chrome OS announcement (me included!). In the past week I must have read 30-40 different articles or blogs on the subject.

Opinion seems very divided on whether it’s a serious threat to Microsoft Windows, no threat, or rather ironically, a threat to Linux.

I see it like this.

1. Google will have a very hard time getting any market share if they only look at netbooks. Of course I’d be naive to think that they don’t intend to attack the desktop at some point.
2. It will be even harder to get any traction on the desktop. Most people still expect to download some .exe file and just install it. The familiarity and enormous installed user base of Windows is a major hurdle to overcome.
3. If it’s locked down to work with Google Apps then am I any better off then being locked into Apple or Windows environments.
4. As for the comments that it further splits the Linux community I can’t really see the problem. I view diversity in the Linux world as a good thing and any work done by Google on instant-on system will undoubtedly feed through to the wider Linux ecosystem.
5. At the end of the day Google were forced into this position. They must know that who controls the desktop also controls (or heavily influences) the online world. Microsoft constantly try to make our online experience a Microsoft-only one by changing the default browser without asking and search to Live Search (or Bing). There’s no way Google can rely on a future where visitors are fed to their apps using Microsoft tools.

Despite the obstacles, from a purely technical point of view, I’m looking forward to see what they come up with. Google have masses of smart people and if they can make a full OS boot and connect to a network in, say 5 seconds, I for one will be very impressed.

After downloading and running the Google Andriod vdi for Virtualbox I decided to try and compile the source myself. I’m following the directions on the andriod-porting Google group including trying to enable networking that didn’t work in the vdi file I downloaded.

I’ve just finished downloading the cupcake source tree from git that takes quite a while as I’m not able to get more than about 1 to 2 Mbit/s when downloading. I’ve also modified the kernel config to include the ‘AMD PCnet32 PCI support’ that is one of the network devices supported by Virtualbox.

Next step is to compile but that’s for another post.

After reading this page about running Google Android in Virtualbox I thought it might be fun to have a go.

Just download the vdi file from the above site and create a new virtual machine. On booting I selected a video mode of 640x480x16 (use letter g) for best results. Note that you also have to enable the Serial Ports in Virtualbox otherwise it hangs at the grub menu. Apart from that it boots in a matter of seconds and looks really good.

Note that there’s no networking or mouse support right now but it’s still fun to play around with. Many thanks to the above site for sharing the vdi file for anyone to try.

Well I guess like every other technology blogger I should give my impression of Google Chrome so as not to disappoint here goes.

Overall I’m very impressed, especially for a first beta release.

1. It’s fast, start up speed is blazingly fast and rendering time on regular pages is good. Javascript heavy sites are very responsive with little or no delay.
2. It’s simple, uncluttered interface is very appealing. It gets the job done with a minimum of options and fuss.
3. If you save pages as applications shortcuts it really does blur the line between local applications on your PC and those running from the internet. A bit like the shortcuts using in some netbooks where email points directly to gmail but even more so.
4. As far as another browser in the marketplace I think more competition can only be a good thing.
5. Very pleased they made it open source, no doubt the new V8 Javascript virtual machine and other elements will make it into other browsers. This will raise the bar for all browser vendors.
6. Looking at the speed improvements it leaves the other browsers way behind and makes IE7/8 seem even more bloated. If Google really push this then it I think it’s a major threat to IE, plus it really takes the wind out of the sails of the unreleased IE8 (not like there was much excitement to begin with).
7. If people are going to use this as their main browser it will need extensions. I just can’t handle seeing adverts again!

Of course I’ve only tested this on Windows (not my OS of choice) but I’m really looking forward to running it on Linux when available.