On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:09 AM, BGB <[email protected]> wrote: < snip ... >
> there is not a whole lot that seems in common between a browser and an OS. > > yes, there is Chrome OS, but I sort of suspect this will (probably) fall on > its face (vs... say... installing real Linux on the netbooks...). > BGB, you're being waay too literal-minded! This thread was (I thought) about architecture, rather than implementation details of current technologies. Chrome OS is a case in point, and FWIW, I expect it to succeed, maybe even beyond Android, because it's been carefully built to give a seamless, painless end-user experience. That's what most people want. Almost everyone who casually uses a computer day-to-day doesn't give a damn about how "powerful" or configurable it is. They just want it to work, get out of their way, and not irritate them unnecessarily. Increasingly, most people spend most of their computer time in a browser anyway. For quite a few, that is (or easily could be) *all* of their time. Chrome OS just trims away several layers of what these users would consider pointless complexity. As others here have mentioned, the Web has *already* become the de-facto universal communications medium. The interesting question to me is, how do we help ordinary people (like, you know, children) *use* this powerful new medium to learn, experiment, express and communicate powerful ideas? As far as this question is concerned Chrome OS and the Lively Kernel bring us back up to almost the level of Smalltalk (plus or minus some semantic noise from Javascript, but hey). Surely we can do better... -- Max
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