Rumours were abound that the first Google ChromeOS device would emerge towards the end of the year. Although this rumour turned out to be false, other snippets of news surrounding Google and the ChromeOS also emerged. One of these stories consists of rumours reported by TechCrunch, and two others are not rumours but simply confirmed facts.
Two things stand out here. Google is apparently quite interested in online casual gaming companies. TechCrunch states that Google invested around 100-200 million USD in Zynga, the company behind things like SpamVille FarmVille and Mafia Wars, immensely crappy but extremely popular games on FaceBook.
Google went a step further with the other social company; they simply flat-out bought Slide. Slide makes a lot of stuff for a lot of social networks, and it’s all things I’d rather steer clear from. Still, the products these companies deliver are very popular, and as such, it makes sense for Google to invest in them.
Furthermore, Google also announced that the Google Chrome Web Store will open in October. Good news: Google will only take 5% of the revenue (a processing fee). This means Google isn’t looking to monetise on the Web Store. Possible bad news: advertisements all over the place?
Bad News: Promotes “Requires WebKit†group-think. Yet more centralisation. I like what this does for promoting web apps as equal, but I don’t like how rapidly detached we are getting from the freedoms of the web.
I really doubt that. You can use whatever technologies you want for the webstore. I think you can use Flash, Java or all the complete standard browser technologies for apps, if you want them to also work on other browsers.
I personally don’t see the problem in everything using Webkit. I mean it’s open source after all, plus all of it’s specific implementations are documented. If someone came out with a better rendering engine down the line it wouldn’t be impossible to implement backwards compatibility in order to shift support over to it.
It just make things a little easier for developers to make a browser if everyones working on the same backend. The way I see it there’s little difference than there being one main Perl, Python, Ruby or Java implementation.
I can’t believe you could say that. Hasn’t history taught us already that having just one rendering engine isn’t healthy? WebKit has a lot of flaws that I’m not happy with and it needs Firefox to keep on its toes.
If there were only WebKit then video on the web would almost certainly be 100% H.264 without options like OGG or WebM. If the web were only WebKit then Apple would hold all the keys to the web. Apple!—who are afraid of the web replacing their profitable app store.
No sir, I don’t like it.
Um no. History has taught us that a proprietary browser using proprietary technologies and quirky implementations exclusive to one proprietary OS dominating the browser market isn’t healthy.
If Trident were an open source project under a copyleft license with the goal of being the most hackable, reusable, embeddable rendering engine out there and with review status regularly granted to rival vendors then the Internet would have an entirely different history.
Also H.264 isn’t apart of the Webkit at all. In fact Webkit has no media handling engine what so ever. You basically have to put one in yourself.
You’re disregarding the influence the owner company can have over something of theirs that is open source.
The only WebKit implementation that supports OGG is OWB on Amiga / MorphOS. Funny that.
OpenSolaris, not so open now, and now they’ve realised that oh-crap, it relies quite a bit on proprietary tech and that’ll have to be rewritten in Illumos.
Looks like a bright future for Java.
Apple decide what gets checked into WebKit, and what gets compiled into the iPhone—nobody else. WebKit hasn’t been forked yet, so I don’t see anything but Apple’s influence on the direction of WebKit.
Again Webkit doesn’t include a media handler. On that end, Chrome/Chromium supports OGG, and WebM (duh), Webkit/GTk+ supports whatever GStreamer supports QtWebkit support what Phonon supports.
The Webkit Project has so far kept their goal of being a general purpose rendering engine. The project so far has code reviewers from Google, Research in Motion, Nokia, Gtk and KDE projects and some obscure companies no one’s heard of. Obviously, If they don’t like what Apple is doing they can fork.
Yes, you’re right. Brain is not functioning today :S
Google needs to can ChromeOS and focus exclusively on Android. Granted ChromeOS is a neat idea but honestly who would buy a ChromeOS tablet over an Android one?
The successive introduction of Android and the arrival of Google Chrome OS, both open source, client-based operating systems, have created some market confusion, especially with Android’s growing success.[43] Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer accused Google of not being able to make up its mind.[44] Google has downplayed this conflict, suggesting that the two operating systems address different markets, mobile and personal computing, which remain distinct despite the growing convergence of the devices. Co-founder Sergey Brin suggested that the two systems “will likely converge over time” –Wikipedia
I wonder if it will support Flash.
It does, yes. It will also (or is planned to) support NaCl with ANGLE—Google’s long term replacement for Flash gaming.
Just wondered what a Google Grand Theft Auto type game might look like.
Imagine a Tony Cipriani like character using branded handguns, hotels and getaway cars.. hehehe
I find it amazing how people think that forking webkit would be an answer to the major crisis of one single engine, controlled by one big company, governing the web.
It might be useful to recall that a long time ago, IE was a perfectly standard-compliant browser…
Edited 2010-08-23 09:19 UTC
I find it amazing how people keep trying to compare Webkit, an open source rendering engine, to Internet Explorer, a proprietary web browser.
As if we had the option of forking Trident. If we did, I’m sure that some time within those 4 years of abandoned development there would have been a fork. (Not to mention Mac and Linux ports.)
In the end Webkit, like other open source projects, is limited by how much contributers like the direction it’s going. I believe this is why the project has been open to people outside of Apple becoming code reviewers.
Let’s suppose webkit becomes dominant and then Apple suddenly decides to kill the webkit svn server, arguing that it’s now fully BSD licensed so they do whatever they want. What can the community do ?
Some say that it may start a fork, organized by a fundamentally disorganized open source community, and backed up by no serious financial power (except maybe Google). This is forgetting something : as soon as Apple become the masters of the web, they will do what they always do. They will introduce more and more proprietary extensions to webkit, while neglecting the web standards.
Options remaining for the fork :
1/Bet on standard support
=========================
Apple now own the web, they are the ones who train the developers, so the fork will be incompatible with most websites, although very standard-compliant. Such browsers never, ever, got popular. This is a dead end.
2/Bet on proprietary tech support
=================================
Since Apple develop the technology, they will always be one generation of proprietary technology ahead. The fork will hence only support outdated websites, without FaceTime video chat and shiny content. Another dead end.
Or am I missing something ?
Edited 2010-08-23 22:49 UTC
I think you’re getting a little carried away with this.
I don’t think they could legally change the license on Webkit. Unless maybe if they got rid of enough code to where they could claim it’s no longer a derivative of KHTML; in addition to any added LGPL’d code from contributers.
Also, Apple would have to dominate the market with Safari (or iPhone/iPad/iMac) in order to have the kind of power you’re talking about. Otherwise that kind of a change would simply push other vendors to jump on another fork without hesitation.
There’s no reason to believe that websites would go by the Safari version of Webkit unless Safari had the majority market share.