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Chrome: The End of Desktop Apps

by John Paczkowski
Posted on November 19, 2009 at 11:02 AM PT

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Bomb

Direct from Google headquarters and liveblogged by John Paczkowski, Google unveiled its Chrome OS. This is the first of three segments:

Google did not offer a beta of the new operating system today. Vice President of Product Management Sundar Pichai says Google is a year away from an official launch. The company, however, is making Chrome OS code available today.

According to Pichai, Google’s Chrome browser has some 40 million users one year after launch. He boasts about the browser’s speed, noting that it handles Javascript 39 times faster than Internet Explorer. There will be three more big Chrome announcements in the future: Chrome for Mac, Chrome for Linux and the debut of Chrome Extensions.

Google’s goal is to ensure that Web applications function as well as desktop apps, Pichai explains. The company is figuring out a way for Web apps to safely take advantage of the operating system in the same way that desktop apps do. A few examples: Graphics, video/audio applications, real-time communication, notification and local storage.

“By 2010 we expect to have all these things built into Chrome.”

The advent of Chrome coincides with a perfect storm of converging trends, Pichai notes, including the tremendous popularity of netbooks during the recession, the growing acceptance of cloud apps and the rapid innovation in mobile devices. Smartphones are becoming more like laptops, he adds, and laptops are becoming more like smartphones. Is there a better level of computing available for these devices? There is, says Pichai, and he believes it is Chrome OS.

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  • Fred Hamranhansenhansen
    It's only the end of low-end desktop apps such as Word and Excel. High-end desktop apps such as Final Cut or Logic are going nowhere.

    If you look at the iPhone and Mac, there are 2 main API's on both:

    - low-end apps are open HTML5
    - high-end apps are proprietary Cocoa

    Compare to Windows, which also has 2 main API's:

    - low-end apps are proprietary IE6
    - high-end apps are proprietary Win32

    And in Google Chrome OS, you have only 1:

    - low-end apps are done in open HTML5
    - high-end apps are not supported

    So Chrome OS enables the user who only requires low-end apps to jettison the complexity that comes with desktop apps and embrace a new network-centric computing model. But it does not enable someone who is editing a motion picture to get any work done at all. It doesn't help the audio producer at all. You can't run a typical Web development toolchain on it, the Unix tools are not there.

    Cocoa supports unlimited real-time 32-bit/192kHz audio streams, while in HTML5 we are still celebrating the new audio tag that lets us play 1 stereo 16-bit/44kHz audio stream without asking another app to do it. So there is quite a ways to go before we could port the typical Cocoa audio production app to HTML5.

    But there are a lot of low-end apps like MS Office that have been done in the high-end API in the past, but can now move to the HTML5 API. Google just called an HTML5 MS Office "a killer app for Chrome OS." However, MS Office online is not currently done in HTML5. Probably 90% of Win32 can move to HTML5, which would make the apps run everywhere, not just on Windows.
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About John

John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »

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