Pixel Picture Clearer? Google Ports Office-Substitute To Chrome OS, Browser 158
CWmike writes "Google confirmed on Tuesday that it has ported part of QuickOffice to a technology baked into Chrome OS and the company's Chrome browser. The popular iOS and Android app substitute for Microsoft Office that Google acquired last year will run using 'Native Client,' a technology that lets developers turn applications written in C and C++ — originally intended to run in, say, Windows. With that it will execute entirely within a browser, specifically Google's own Chrome. Google claims that Native Client code runs almost as fast inside the browser as the original did outside. QuickOffice viewers come bundled with the $1,300 Chrome OS-based Chromebook Pixel notebook, and Google will add editing functionality in the next two to three months. Does this all make the Pixel make more sense?"
Does all this make the Pixel make more sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Agreed, but what does this have to do with the Pixel??
I can see this as a story about MS vs. Google, or about Google's Native Client technology - which, incidentally, is supported by the Chrome browser. It is not - as this story seems to suggest - limited to ChromeOS or the Pixel.
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But when you see that Google intends Pixel+ChromeOS to be more than a toy. If Office, why not, say, GIMP or some audio/video editing software? *That* plus the 1TB-for-3-years - suddenly Pixel+ChromeOS makes a little bit more sense, though I still think its overpriced.
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No.
Well put. It still makes no sense because with the exception of the screen it's packed with old or unreasonably spec'd hardware at a ridiculously high price compared to an Apple product (that are supposed to be high priced crap by a lot of /. opinion) that runs a full OS, plus a browser, plus a cloud, plus a lot of other things a real computer can do. Then there's an Android based system with a large app base, extensible, cheaper, more storage (32 GB SSD in the Chrome book Pixel?!?! Seriously?!?!). I could
Cloud fail? (Score:2)
Whatever happens to their sales pitch for Google Docs for enterprise?
Slashvertisement (Score:2)
>Google will add editing functionality in the next two to three months
What? An Office suite without editing functionality on a $1300 device? Computers were more capable in the 70s and 80s.
Also look at the summary from the story yesterday about HP making Android tablets:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/02/25/2129208/hp-continuing-to-flee-windows-reservation-with-android-tablet?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed [slashdot.org]
"Hewlett-Packard seems more determined than ever to flee the Windows reservation, unveiling a $170 Android tablet, the HP Slate 7. It runs Google Android 4.1, the first version of the 'Jelly Bean' build, which has been ever so slightly outdated by the recent release of Android 4.2. This isn't the first time in recent memory that HP's opted for a Google product over one offered by longtime partner Microsoft. As it helpfully pointed out in a press release, HP has produced a Chromebook running Google's Chrome OS, a largely cloud-dependent operating system for laptops and notebooks. Built around Google services such as Gmail, Chrome OS also offers access to the Chrome Web Store, an online storefront for apps. If HP and other manufacturers increasingly adopt Google's offerings over Windows, it could cause some consternation among Microsoft executives. Microsoft, of course, is pushing Windows 8, which is meant to run on tablets and traditional PCs with equal facility. If it wants the Windows division to continue as a cash cow, it needs manufacturers to adopt that operating system in massive numbers. Android and Chrome OS could make that strategy a lot more difficult."
What has Chrome OS got to do with HP making Android tablets that it deserves a
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I agree, but only because it already made perfect sense. Google is not trying to make a mass market popular device, they are setting a high bar for Chromebooks to change their image from cheap low end device to luxury laptop.
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The limitations of the device stops it from being luxury
That never stopped Apple. /Cheap_shot
There are limitations, but there were also limitations between Apple and Windows and Linux in any direction. The important question is, are the limitations important enough. This community is power users. But for average users, a generally web based experience may be fine, nay, better. I can't remember how many times people have lost all the digital photos they ever took because backup (to the cloud) didn't happen by default. With this device its built in, etc.
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Google is not trying to make a mass market popular device, they are setting a high bar for Chromebooks to change their image from cheap low end device to luxury laptop.
Fail, fail. All they have done is produce an expensive low end device, and what makes it low end is the limited OS, which is especially egregious on a powerful system.
Google should put its effort into Chrome for Android so they can abandon ChromeOS as what it is, an evolutionary dead end.
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Pixel Picture Clearer?
Still to cloudy to see.
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some people, yours truly included, prefer the lag-free typing that one gets on a decent-powered desktop app. I have always found lag while using online wordprocessors. They keyboard shortcuts that I use/want-to-use are not present, not properly implemented. There are other reasons. I want to use a stable 'decent' alternate solution which lets me work on the desktop with ease. Right now my choices are limited to LibreOffice and AbiWord/Gnumeric.
Grammurh? (Score:4, Insightful)
I had to re-read this summary multiple times to understand it. I'm not saying it needs to be perfect, I know I'm not, but that summary is just terribly written.
make more sense? (Score:4, Funny)
"make more sense?"
Not yet, but keep going.
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What struck me about Surface RT was it came with MS Office but didn't support touch. Indeed the Office division barely ported it across with only a few tweaks (they boasted about turning off the cursor blink as if that was a big thing!). The whole OS seemed to have been botched to run the desktop version of Office.
It's like Microsoft are lazy or have corporate inertia.
So whether Google delivers a successful Office port for Chrome is not as important as whether they deliver a touch version. Because a touch version would easily port to Android and be across everything. Then MS's second cash cow would also be under attack (think Windows 8 vs Android).
previously MS ui kits were built _FOR_ office(so what if it was practically 20 years ago).
because that makes sense, you know, because otherwise the office team has to hack an ui on top of an ui kit not suitable at all for building a text processor.
aaaaaand that's what they have to do with metro.
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Google figured out that a computer that runs only cloud based stuff isn't such a good idea. But, since Chrome OS doesn't have native apps, they had to hack those native apps into Chrome, where they run "almost as fast" as they would if they were proper applications under a real OS. As a demonstration of how great this technology is, Google hacked an entire open source office suite into Chrome.
That certainly does explain why you'd want to buy a Chromebook that costs more than an ultrabook or an Air.
It almost sounds like Google wrote the summary... except for the use of annoying cliches and the incomplete sentences.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Informative)
...except for the use of annoying cliches and the incomplete sentences.
You're looking at the glass as half empty instead of half full here. it's a start ....
I know, folks are penny wise and pound foolish with some of the Chrome book .... of course there's a silver lining here - it will make Chrome OS more usable outside of a dumb terminal for the cloud.
anyway, I'll make like a tree ....
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's not just about the software, but the method of delivery of it. Think the App Store/Google Play/Chrome Web Store. With this play, Google is deploying mass-market business applications through a centrally managed repository/marketplace that runs on a portable browser platform. This is Google's vision of the PC, and also the reason why Microsoft has been such a big detractor of Google. If Google can pull this off, Microsoft will go the way of Blackberry.
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Actually, it's not just about the software, but the method of delivery of it. Think the App Store/Google Play/Chrome Web Store. With this play, Google is deploying mass-market business applications through a centrally managed repository/marketplace that runs on a portable browser platform. This is Google's vision of the PC, and also the reason why Microsoft has been such a big detractor of Google. If Google can pull this off, Microsoft will go the way of Blackberry.
...and then all our base belong to Google.
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I think Google has slipped up a little here. They were making a compelling argument for Chrome books by offering inexpensive notebooks and selling the power of the Google web infrastructure to provide always up-to-date applications with no need for backups. Of course, this technology is far from being new and it
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An IBM Selectric typewriter is more usable than a dumb terminal outside the cloud.
Haha! That was a funny summary of an offline Chrome OS.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Informative)
Google figured out that a computer that runs only cloud based stuff isn't such a good idea. But, since Chrome OS doesn't have native apps, they had to hack those native apps into Chrome, where they run "almost as fast" as they would if they were proper applications under a real OS. As a demonstration of how great this technology is, Google hacked an entire open source office suite into Chrome.
That certainly does explain why you'd want to buy a Chromebook that costs more than an ultrabook or an Air.
It almost sounds like Google wrote the summary... except for the use of annoying cliches and the incomplete sentences.
Quickoffice [wikipedia.org] isn't open source - it's a proprietary IOS and Android app... Google bought the company last year.
I'd be more impressed if they *did* port Openoffice/Libreoffice to Chrome.
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I would be even more impressed if they open sourced Chrome.
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Well, with that logic Apple's web browser Safari is open source too.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
The price point is also confusing. It is $100 more than a MacBook air. I know it comes with an office app, cellular and a touch screen, but OO.org is free, and the Apple office suite is only $60, for all the machines on an account. And a cellular router is only $60, and if you buy it separately you can go with any carrier you want. It is not like this thing is a tablet and you will walking around with it. OTOH, it only comes with 32GB, while that air comes with 128GB. Of course you get 1TB online for 3 years, but we all know how reliable Google is at responding to end user problems. In any case it is a $150 value.
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I have been really disappointed at the lack of development in Google docs over the past year. They have clearly become bored with the project, and one again gone off on another tangent. That is the thing with Google. No focus, other than collecting user data and selling it, which is fine, but they used to give us good services in return.
Exactly.
Google has a very distressing habit of going all-out on a Project, then, even if it is even moderately successful, suddenly saying "Well, we're done with this. Thanks for playing!" Everyone does this to some extent; but Google is even worse about it than Microsoft (I think).
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Next maybe they'll admit that possibly it's not a good idea to run your office suite in your browser at all. They could provide some sort of launcher or task manager or start menu to let you start the web browser and/or the office suite, and let you switch between them!
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For those that missed the feeble joke the "new" cloud thing was pushed hard by John Gage at Sun around a decade or more ago. The difference now is we've got more bandwidth, better CGI scripts (by whatever name), and the ability to drag in more content from other places than just images hosted elsewhere. I'm not sure what we've got in the way of client side scripting in any better considering all the java problems and active-x being an almos
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A good summary, but you're forgetting one thing: we've also got a MUCH better reason to get everyone back to the thin client (although let's try and make those expensive thin clients) and server paradigm: targeted advertising.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Informative)
Your 'translation' is wrong on every point.
- Native Client apps are cloud apps - they just use a different client technology.
- Second Chrome OS (and Chrome) does have native apps - via NaCl - and has for a while. This isn't new at all.
- This isn't hacked into Chrome - it's not part of Chrome at all.
- There is no way that anyone at Google would want to write such a misleading and confusing summary.
This is just a new cloud app, that runs on an existing client technology that's been built-into Chrome and Chrome OS for a while.
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Let's see. I wrote my "translation" based on the summary and the article. True, those things are known to be incorrect sometimes. So let's examine your claims (which in another post you claim should be modded up because they are factually correct).
Okay, first, what exactly do you think NaCl stands for (in Google wor
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You suck.
(As an example of modder feedback)
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Ah slashdot. Someone writes negative comment that is factually incorrect on every point - modded to 5. I correct their mistakes - modded down to zero.
"Native Client apps are cloud apps - they just use a different client technology." What the shit does cloud apps mean, anyway? When you define it then we can proceed to tell you why you're wrong. "This isn't hacked into Chrome - it's not part of Chrome at all." Saying it's "hacked in" doesn't mean anything. It does require Chrome.
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They are separate apps that they are delivered from the cloud (not baked in) and store their data in the cloud (though they can work offline). They are web apps but they use NaCl instead of javascript (often the NaCl apps still use HTML, though I don't know in this case). NaCl is built-in, but the apps that run on it aren't.
There are some native apps that are 'baked' or 'hacked' into ChromeOS (I believe the photo editor), but QuickOffice is not - that's why this new edition of QuickOffice could just as ea
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They are separate apps that they are delivered from the cloud (not baked in) and store their data in the cloud (though they can work offline). They are web apps but they use NaCl instead of javascript (often the NaCl apps still use HTML, though I don't know in this case). NaCl is built-in, but the apps that run on it aren't.
It doesn't matter how they are delivered, if they install and run locally then they're installed and run locally, and if they're run from chrome then they're in chrome.
There are some native apps that are 'baked' or 'hacked' into ChromeOS (I believe the photo editor), but QuickOffice is not - that's why this new edition of QuickOffice could just as easily be delivered to regular Chrome browsers while the ChromeOS photo editor can't.
It could be delivered to them just as easily, but would it run on them? Chrome on Chromebooks is different from Chrome on PCs is different from Chrome on Android.
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> It doesn't matter how they are delivered, if they install and run locally then they're installed and run locally, and if they're run from chrome then they're in chrome.
But then how do you distinguish this from regular web apps/pages? Perhaps your use of the word 'install' is your key, but these NaCl apps are no more or less installed then an advanced web apps: they can be cached in the browser, or even pre-cached, but they are still not a component of the OS or of the browser.
Come to think of it, I'm
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if they install and run locally then they're installed and run locally, and if they're run from chrome then they're in chrome.
But then how do you distinguish this from regular web apps/pages? Perhaps your use of the word 'install' is your key
Yep, pretty much. I can't be the only one who remembers Google Gears, either, and offline gmail for firefox. But that got tossed over when Google decided to implement their own browser.
Come to think of it, I'm using Firefox and I have a bunch of add-ons 'installed' in my browser, so I guess the term 'install' is already used for web-apps.
Well, some extensions are webapps, but some of them are just extensions. Many of the ones that are webapps are also available in another form, like a greasemonkey script.
The Chrome browser has supported NaCl for a while. It is mostly used for games.
That still doesn't tell us if it has the features needed to run this software. There have been things which ran on the chromebook which didn't run in chrome
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>Yep, pretty much. I can't be the only one who remembers Google Gears, either, and offline gmail for firefox. But that got tossed over when Google decided to implement their own browser.
Gears worked with Chrome too. They killed it in favour of standard HTML5 functionality (though they killed it too soon - the HMTL5 stuff wasn't ready).
> That still doesn't tell us if it has the features needed to run this software. There have been things which ran on the chromebook which didn't run in chrome in the pa
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Perhaps (and I could be wrong here) another reason to buy this Pixel is that it's got decent hardware but isn't going to be troubled by secure-boot and things like that so you can install your own OS on it if you get tired of chrome-OS.
No. It DOES have secure boot on it. It's got a dev mode and a 3rd BIOS slot that boots an more standard bios image (I probably could have phrased that better), but you will still be troubled by secure boot, assuming you find it troubling in the first place. If you choose to use it this way, you're stuck in developer mode, which means it will take 30 seconds longer than usual to load every time you start it, because the boot sequence feels the need to take that time to remind you that you’re in Develop
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It seems you're wrong. The Pixel looks like it's less locked down than previous ChromeBooks so you can run Linux on it (although it's easiest to run particular blessed distros) but if you want something else you're out of luck. Or you can get some decent hardware for a similar price from Apple and run OS X, Linux, Windows, BSD or whatever else, or from any of a number of other laptop manufacturers and run any of those except OS X.
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I think you're mixing openoffice with quickoffice.
openoffice port would have been impressive(and useful).
quickoffice on the other hand is a document READER application for which google paid an ungodly sum of money for after quickoffices money pipe from Nokia was cut short after nokia finally after 3 years of "really soon now" got their act together and helped MS do the port to symbian for MS's own office tools(which was kinda late anyhow, since symbian at that point was on it's way out - but the point is qu
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No, I think I was thinking of Star Office (which apparently turned semi-proprietary again when Oracle took over). There are so many X Office suites... somebody should think of another naming scheme.
Quick Office... is that the crappy smartphone reader software?
If the native code thing is so great I wonder why Google didn't port something more substantial. Possibly because it's difficult and slow?
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As a demonstration of how great this technology is, Google hacked an entire open source office suite into Chrome.
Quickoffice is open source?
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Nope. My mistake. There are so many XX Offices.
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"almost as fast" as they would if they were proper applications under a real OS
Just like Windows then...
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Unless they're comparing to Windows.
Re:Translation - ActiveX re-invented! Whooptidoo (Score:2)
What is a browser anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is a browser anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it weren't for the MS tie-in, and it was truly an open standard, wouldn't it make more sense than trying to string together HTML and JavaScript in clever ways to accomplish the same thing?
Why is "stringing together HTML and Javascript" a bad way of doing things? Really, for these UI-type things, most development models involve you creating "things", stringing them together with "actions" and (possibly) changing the way they look with a "skin". Why is using HTML to define the things, javscript to define the actions, and CSS to describe the skin, a bad idea? Is there a different language for one of those functions that you think is more appropriate to that particular domain for some reason?
In short HTML+JS+CSS are rapidly (relatively speaking) converging on the capabilities of Flash/Silverlight - and bringing some of their historical strengths (accessibility, separation of content and style, human-readable data formats, open standards, etc) to the table as well. I mean, doesn't Flash even now use a Javascript dialect for its scripting capabilities?
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If it weren't for the MS tie-in, and it was truly an open standard, wouldn't it make more sense than trying to string together HTML and JavaScript in clever ways to accomplish the same thing?
Why is "stringing together HTML and Javascript" a bad way of doing things? Really, for these UI-type things, most development models involve you creating "things", stringing them together with "actions" and (possibly) changing the way they look with a "skin". Why is using HTML to define the things, javscript to define the actions, and CSS to describe the skin, a bad idea? Is there a different language for one of those functions that you think is more appropriate to that particular domain for some reason?
In short HTML+JS+CSS are rapidly (relatively speaking) converging on the capabilities of Flash/Silverlight - and bringing some of their historical strengths (accessibility, separation of content and style, human-readable data formats, open standards, etc) to the table as well. I mean, doesn't Flash even now use a Javascript dialect for its scripting capabilities?
I have used 'Office' apps written in HTML+Javascript as well as poor-mans Visio substitutes written in Flash and while they were useful for casual note taking they quickly reached their limits once I wanted to do a bit more like add references, automatically indexed figures and captions, figure and tables indexes, tables of content, etc. With drawing programs written in Flash it was pretty much the same story plus only begin able to export your drawings in some strange Flash format or JPG/PNG/etc. wasn't ex
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Exactly. I created a web based ERP system in last 3 years and I feel that with every cell of my body.
JavaScript is not suitable for large scale development, even with frameworks (We use JQuery). It is difficult to introduce structure into it, it does not handle typed variables well and several other shortcomings. It was not supposed to be used for large scale serious applications in my opinion.
Html itself is a messy language (if at all).
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I wouldn't consider JQuery a framework, and if that's what you were looking for, no wonder you had problems. JQuery is a nice collection of shortcuts with a selector engine and some cross-platform abstraction, that over time has grown into something more powerful simply because of how common it is. It's getting better, especially as they throw away some backwards compatibility with older versions, but I wouldn't use it as my starting point for a full web app or an ERP system.
If you wanted an honest-to-goodn
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I'd prefer to do it all in one language, not three plus the back end
Why? You don't use C++ to query a database do you? Why would you use it to describe a visual style? It's a procedural programming language, not a stylesheet language. Horses for courses.
plus the various JS frameworks
What, you never use any common libraries for your non-web code? That's all those JS frameworks are - useful, general functions collected into a library.
...gets extended to cover all scenarios, when there are older and better technologies around. For example, did we have to reinvent everything on the desktop in the browser?
Bad example. An app that runs on the desktop is not comparable to one that performs the same function in a browser. For one, the browser app is inherently accessible remotel
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That's because HTML is a semantic language, not a visual language. A designer would work against the languages purpose, and only serve for limited purposes. (There are *lots* of HTML designers that work "as well as Win32" for limited purposes, btw.)
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And that's why HTML is not very good for doing visual things. HTML's original purpose is directly at odds with the roles it is being asked to perform today.
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but a framework/engine like Silverlight accomplishes all the things you just listed and enables a much greater level of productivity (in my opinion) than HTML/JS/CSS.
Yeah, but why? Is it the IDE used for generating Silverlight apps? If so, is there something about the underlying code Silverlight generates that makes it more amenable to being managed by an IDE than HTML+JS+CSS? If so, what are the features that make it so? How much effort is it to incorporate those sort of features into HTML+JS+CSS?
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The problems with HTML/web arise because it is stateless, browsers differ in their implementation, and the only language available on the front end is js, which is not terrible, but not beautiful either, and content is not always separated from code.
The many advantages of HTML/web come from the fact that it is stateless, most operations are idempotent and cachable, URIs can be shared, and that it's so simple even humans can create it by hand (and getting simpler with html5), readers get to control presentat
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Don't we need to eventually concede the possibility that something like Silverlight wouldn't be that bad? If it weren't for the MS tie-in, and it was truly an open standard, wouldn't it make more sense than trying to string together HTML and JavaScript in clever ways to accomplish the same thing?
No, and maybe, in that order. Nothing wrong with Javascript, you're going to need a programming language no matter what your solution looks like and you'll wind up with the same security issues no matter what. And HTML is designed for displaying text and works fine for displaying graphics, so if what you need to do is display some text and graphics, why shouldn't you use HTML?
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No, because what browsers are intended for has changed.
This is simply equivocation: the "we" isn't the same group in both parts of this sentence? The
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Yet:
"Although Google has debuted a partial native client edition of QuickOffice on Chrome OS and plans to wrap up the port on that platform, there are no technical barriers that prevent the finished application from also running within the Chrome browser on Windows, OS X and Linux.
Google declined to comment on whether or when it will offer QuickOffice for Chrome."
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I would be reluctant to claim a "solid security track record", until we start actually seeing active use of NaCl.
Coherence (Score:2)
Everything old is new again (Score:5, Insightful)
Hurray to Google for re-inventing ActiveX. May they have just as much success as Microsoft with it.
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Native client is open-source; activeX was not. That has very real implications: though I doubt we'll see MS adopt, there is a very real possibility that Firefox and Opera could.
Look at SPDY for comparison. Google added it to Chrome, now Amazon, Opera, Firefox, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are all using it.
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What do you mean by "ActiveX was not open source"? ActiveX is a protocol, a specification - a bunch of ABIs (COM) and APIs [microsoft.com]. IE is closed-source, yes, but you can definitely have another browser support ActiveX controls (in fact, Mozilla was halfway there with XPCOM, and someone actually wrote a plugin for it that lets it host ActiveX controls). For that matter, ActiveX was never IE-specific - any Windows app can host a control, and many apps do, both those from Microsoft and third-party ones. It does not re
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What do you mean by "ActiveX was not open source"? ActiveX is a protocol, a specification - a bunch of ABIs (COM) and APIs.
Yes, and none of the relevant code was Open-Sourced. I suspect that's what they meant when they said that. You know, what they said.
The real problem is that ActiveX controls are inherently non-portable, because the API is Windows-centric - for example, it deals in things like Win32 device context and window handles.
The problem isn't that they're non-portable, the problem is that the Windows API stinks on ice for every reason.
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NaCl is open source but tied to totally undocumented Chrome internals via Pepper, which makes it pretty hard to adopt without adopting Chrome wholesale.
Worse yet, NaCl is tied to particular hardware, which means that if it gets traction on the web the bar for a new hardware platform would become very high (think "ARM would not have been viable if this had happened 15 years ago" high). PNaCl, if/when it starts working would help with that problem, but not the Pepper dependency.
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Chrome itself is actually not open source.
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No. ATL was for developers to write components compatible with ActiveX - that's different then making ActiveX itself open-source.
And, as you point out, MS's license ensured that no one else adopted it. It was meant as a proprietary extension.
Google mostly uses standard open-source licenses, like GPL and Apache - that's why their technologies get adopted.
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Actually, it's more like everything old is still old.
Given that Native Client has been around for five years now, don't you think you've had enough time to learn that it's NOT like ActiveX?. Try Googling Native Client vs ActiveX to get yourself started.
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Native Client is a security disaster waiting to happen. Java (as in applets) is more secure than NaCl, since it offers run-time privilege checking while NaCl only supports static checking. At its base it is exactly like ActiveX in the later years (when MS added static checking) - in other words, something IT professionals should ban on their networks.
If you have to have applications, write Java applets or Silverlight stuff. Both work. Both are significantly safer than NaCl, and both are used very little. Ap
This could actually sink Chrome altogether (Score:2)
It was ActiveX that almost single handedly drove users away from Internet Explorer. ActiveX was a massive security problem from day one and was always an incredibly easy venue for malicious code.
It's not clear to me whether this ability to execute code is intended solely for Chrome OS, or whether it is intended for all versions of the Chrome browser. If the intent is the latter, this has a good chance of driving users en masse away from Chrome as Google's security nightmare is probably just beginning.
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Native Client has been in all versions of Chrome (well, except Chrome for iOS) and enabled-by-default for apps from the Chrome Web Store since Chrome 14; there are a number of apps that leverage it in the store.
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NaCl restricts applications to a limited memory region and instruction set, with no possibility of interaction with the outside world
As does Java. Supposedly. NaCl is just another attack vector, and it will fail. There was no need for Google to create yet another attack vector in the browser. They did anyway.
Re:Everything old is new again (Score:5, Informative)
The big difference between ActiveX and NaCl is that the latter has a sandbox - a very smart one, actually, which lets it run native code directly while remaining secure.
The other big difference is that they are also tackling the architecture portability issue by the PNaCl project (basically downloading LLVM bitcode and compiling it for the current architecture).
So, yes, this is like ActiveX - but done right. All the perf of native code with none of the security issues.
I really, really hope it catches on - especially PNaCl. If it does, we can finally ditch JS as the web client language, and move on to something more decent (and better yet, you and me can make different choices about the languages that we want to use).
Well, not until IE has it (Score:5, Informative)
In my opinion the whole application on a browser thing happened because MS has (had?) a monopoly on desktop. So if you wanted to develop something cross-platform that has a UI, you had following options:
* Do it in a cross platform language that has UI programming. The only one I know is Java. 10 years ago, computers were much slower, and Java on desktop was quite worse than it is right now, so this would result in sub-par applications.
* Do it in C/C++ and use a cross-platform tookit. The only ones worth talking about are wxWidgets and Qt, and again, 10 years ago they weren't mature. On top of that you need to deal with tons of "backend" programming hassles, as windows is not really posix compatible. Again, cross-plaform toolkits like Qt or wxWidgets help here, but only some.
* Use some kind of thin client technology and do all the heavy lifting on the server. This basically evolved into a web server + a browser as a thin client. And until AJAX, your applications could not offer much interactivity.
All thigs considered, for many things browser-as-a-thin-client model makes a lot of sense. You always get the latest version immediately, you don't need to install anything (installing/removing/updating software is a huge hassle on windows. I'm appalled windows still doesn't have any package management and repositories). You get decent security- you can trust a web page will not screw up your computer (well, except some exploits in the browswer, but that's nothing compared to installing and running a native app from untrusted source).
Looking back I always think if this could have been done better. HTML+JS is quite nasty from an application development point of view. First of all, JS works differently on different browsers, and these differences are hardly documented. Things like GWT or jQuery help, but the problem is still there. Again, Microsoft and IE screw things up badly for everyone time and time again. Another two things- running inside a browser you don't have propper networking support and access to local storage. Both are required for complex interactive applications. HTML5 is an attempt to improve both, but it remains to be seen how successful it is. HTML/CSS layout is hard. There are still few to none WYSIWYG tools to drag and drop UI elements and construct a web-app in this way. And web-apps have a different look & feel than native apps- you still need to think in terms of URLs, "back" buttons, tabs, browser menus, etc. And not all hotkeys work either.
In general, I think a browser using HTML/JS/HTTP is a bad to mediocre thin client for applications. The only reason its so widely used is because it comes preinstalled on all new computers/tablets/mobiles shipped. If Microsoft wasn't a monopoly, it would have been possible to ship some other better thin-client with all the machines sold, and we would not have to deal with all this mess. I would probably prefer to have a browser just for reading PAGES, and a dedicated thin client for running remote apps. Hopefully things will get better with HTML5, and Microsoft has less influence on internet standards these days...
Sorry for the long rant,
--Coder
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All the perf of native code with none of the security issues
I have a perpetual motion machine and am seeking investors. I take it you'll be subscribing?
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Why don't you go and read the original paper [chromium.org] on NaCl? I know it's considered a novel concept on Slashdot, and somewhat faux pas (you are the 4th person to reply to my comment who apparently didn't do it), but still, try it. I promise I won't tell anyone.
As a side note, no perfect security was claimed here - only that security challenges specific running to native code are handled by NaCl sandbox, making it as safe as, say, JavaScript.
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* Interpreted source code.
* Interpreted source code with a JIT compiler that produces native implementations of hotspots.
* Interpreted intermediate representation of source code
* Bytecode that's executed in a virtual machine
* Native code that's executed in a sandbox
In all these cases, you are running untr
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I don't know - ask JavaScript guys, they've been doing it for two decades now.
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It depends on how the sandboxing is implemented. I suggest you read the paper about NaCl - it is a really clever technique that puts it at least on par with any interpreter in terms of exploitation vectors, if not better. At which point it's no more a security risk than JS.
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At which point it's no more a security risk than JS
You had your tongue firmly planted in your cheek when you wrote that? If not, google JavaScript exploits. There have been many. Once they give full access to your graphics drivers, watch the number of exploits go way up.
Seems like nobody in the industry reads history books about the industry.
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No, I did not. We already have JS, and it won't go anywhere unless replaced by something better. And the replacement only has to be as good as JS itself is, security-wise.
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won't go anywhere unless replaced by something better
and that is called "just about anything but not ActiveX or ActiveX light (aka NaCl).
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What exactly are your problems with NaCl?
ActiveX was vilified - and rightly so - because it had no meaningful security model whatsoever, no sandbox. It just ran the downloaded code, with full privileges of your user account. This is very different from NaCl.
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What exactly are your problems with NaCl?
It is yet another attack vector in the browser. There have been many, they have all had serious problems. NaCl is certainly not more secure than Java, and look at that track record. Now there will be (for most people) JS, Java, Silverlight, Flash etc, and for Chrome users, all of the above PLUS NaCl. That makes the browsing experience less secure. We need fewer attack vectors, not more. NaCl doesn't solve a single problem that wasn't already solved, and it is therefore utterly unneeded. Adding unneeded att
No it does not (Score:2, Insightful)
Does this all make the Pixel make more sense? (Score:2)
Nope (Score:2)
It's still an overpriced thin client with a nice screen.
Will it run Windows 8? (Score:2)
I'm curious to know how Windows 8 will run on this thing. W8 is supposed to be designed to run well on a wide variety of pixel densities. This thing's got a ton of pixels and a touchscreen. Should me a match made in heaven. It's a bit low on RAM and storage but it's enough to install and run the OS and a full suite of productivity apps.
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That's a shame. I wonder how well Chrome will handle mismatched DPIs. The device has a mini displayport so they have to expect that external monitors will be connected and they'll have to have significantly lower DPIs than the built-in display. But I'm not $1300 curious. ;^>
It's a trap... (Score:2)
I've already said it when Google launched Chrome: they are trying to tie the users in. Sooner or later, they're going to offer a product that is exclusively available in Chrome. They're going to do better gaming in Chrome (Javascript is too slow; think how nice Farmville can look!). That time seems to have come. And once accepted, there's no way back, and the masses will be logged into their google account forever.
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Inefficient (Score:2)
Need laptop advice ... (Score:2)