My post from Tumblr:
Google just made a massive move with chrome, and you all think it's simply just a browser :P
I have adapted my IRC conversation in the Linux Outlaws IRC room on Freenode to suit a fluently reading presentation of my conversation and thought process with personal enlightenment.
Enlightenment:
1) Each tab is a thread.
2) Operating systems (Linux, Mac, Windows) And desktop environments (Windows Aero, KDE, Gnome, XFCE) use the exact same technology for task and window switching.
3) What do u think happens if I bootstrap Chrome from the grub/boot menu?
Answer: An operating system that's basically like a kiosk, but you CAN use HTML files on your computer instead of fetching them from the network for as fast as possible speed, you could just patch text files and not update entire binary blobs of an application to change or even debug a view or application if it's all in HTML/Ajax form. ;)
The blogosphere's fabled "Google OS" roots are being rooted very firmly right now and no-one outside Google seems to even realize this, and seems to only see the book by its cover and release event to which Chrome is only labeled "yet another" Browser.
A You tube presentation of Chrome had developers and project lead's explain Chrome on launch day: You tube Release Presentation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d1_ool4r7s)
Simply Imagine your whole desktop was Ulteo style, all on your hard drive, but all as HTML/Ajax simply accessing local data on your computer, HTML/Ajax user interfaces that are EyeOS style: http://eyeos.org/en/ that DOES reside in HTML files, and not all binary data from Chrome's Open source nature is possible or even compile per CPU optimized builds.
Oh yes, Chrome itself could be a very good desktop environment, no more Qt, GTK, FLTK… Just HTML/Ajax UI's which is why they made that V8 JavaScript engine so amazingly optimized, that JavaScript engine is seriously hard-core good!
The fabled Google OS is ACTUALLY possible now since Chrome runs each tab as a process just like an operating system kernel/desktop environment; even with a Linux core running the chrome browser desktop environment, it's open source extensible nature and future plug-in back-end would make an entire desktop actually plausible!
I hear you say: yeah but HTML isn't fast enough!! My reply: lol do u even know the average Windows user?!? :P
Most people have 1-2 CPU cores, and are used to XP shit & Vista shit slowing down their computer and have their desktops be entirely latent and are slow as hell anyways, and even so; Chrome's tabs are an OS process, which can have 1 process per CPU and spawn THOUSANDS of threads internal of each tab!
Also from the URL bar, you could just say /run CCleaner, or /run XChat; something that can cause a binary to be executed from the "Omnibar" could let existing apps live inside Chrome.
Bottom line is The AVERAGE and the majority of market share DON'T care about Ajax UI's or Qt UI's or GTK UI's, so long as it works and its usable by the person which equals productivity and efficiency. From a developers standpoint(as I am) are plagued by the choice and porting to other UI toolkits; but HTML and Ajax are W3C standardized and can always make new bindings based on the spec.
ALSO people have gotten Doom and Wolfenstein to run fully 3D accelerated/OpenGL in JavaScript, Flash and a Java applet in a browser, with a usable frame rate inside the browser for Just-In-Time(JIT ala Haskell and Java) compiled C code to run on the CPU and not in the Webkit/KHTML engine.
The majority of market share and people care about eye candy as the result, thus OpenGL+HTML+Speed(V8)=eyecandy/success!
My closing thoughts on this are simple, basically every puzzle piece of this that is needed to create this is a reality and already exists, but the pieces are scattered and not arranged into the full beautiful picture yet.
And that's all for now, if you want to contact me or the people I first told this chain of thought to, come into #linuxoutlaws on the Freenode IRC server.
