This is the worst day in commercially available operating system security in my lifetime. There have been bad operating systems in the past (pre come-to-Jesus Microsoft, like 98 and XP...), but rarely has anyone taken a great security product (ChromeOS) and merged it with the worst currently-shipping security product (Android).
Most of ChromeOS's safety "features" come at the expense of not being able to do anything; ChromeOS can't run arbitrary malicious code because it can't really run ANY arbitrary code. Yes, yes, Emscripten, the birth and death of Javascript, etc. -- the fact is that security through uselessness isn't a recipe for adoption.
With Marshmallow Android is moving towards a runtime-permission-prompt model similar to Chrome. They've also done a lot of work on sandboxing using SELinux. Also, after stagefright they started doing monthly security patches and have gotten buy-in from the OEMs to push those patches. Android's biggest security challenge has been getting the manufacturers and carriers to update their software but there has been a lot of work towards changing that, from moving big parts of the OS to userland so they can be updated independently of the core system, to applying business pressure. Presumably updates will be easier on Chromebooks than on phones.
I hoped Google would merge Android into ChromeOS, a much more lightweight OS. Now they are stuck with the broken Java UI architecture (too much sits in the main thread, too many object oriented classes). Low latency UI isn't possible by the initial pre-Google (Android company) bad design choices. Even my high end Android phones is just as fast and responsive as the iPhone 6s but has 4 times as much CPU and a lot higher CPU raw speed and 4 times as much RAM. Beside that Android is the good guy, it's the Win95 20 years later - an universal OS that can be used for many things without restrictions. The Android 5+ UI theme is really outstanding great, I personally favour it over iOS 7+ and Win8+. Maybe Android will get HTML5 web apps as first party citizens. And don't forget about the lovely Go language.
There's nothing insecure about Android. It just gives a few more ways to install apps (side loading for example) which clever social engineers/scammers use to their advantage. It's like saying your credit card is insecure because you gave it to the homeless guy on the street when he promised to only buy a sandwich...
I don't know what's so horrible about an OS that by default encrypts all data on the device, allows applications only to run in a sandbox and uses SELinux.
Nah, you just don't see the big picture. You're coming at it from the tech side. It's better to look at the business side. Microsoft has 89% desktop market share, so they basically own the desktop. Apple will never be a real threat because of price. Chrome/Android has an excellent chance to be a real alternative on the desktop. if it gets a large enough market share, perhaps we'll see Adobe's apps, for instance, along with all other major apps.
How do you qualify Android as the worst security-shipping product? Is it mainly due to the lack of sound update mechanisms? Because conceptually, Android's model (each application is its own Unix user) seems pretty good
It depends. Maybe we just see the Play store added to chromebooks, and chromebooks are rebranded as android devices. I mean, there's already so many different android runtimes/versions, what's one more?
That's a pretty bold statement to make. The announcement contains zero detail, to the point that I'm left questioning what the purpose of leaking the information was other than page views.
Android will have good security just once they've added more stapled-on legs. Security doesn't come from engineering and good design, it comes from adding more things!
The biggest difference between Android and Chrome OS for me as a user is how it handles user multi-tasking.
I've tried using an Android tablet for work. It's nigh impossible, even with a keyboard because it doesn't support multi-tasking well. Sure, it supports OS multi-tasking, but it doesn't support user multi-tasking.
Android is based around the single-task model. You have a foreground app that takes up the entire screen and other apps are backgrounded. You can switch between apps fairly quickly, but you can only have one open at a time. There are some attempts to fix this, such as Samsung's split-screen, but none are officially supported. We've even moved to having Chrome tabs use this model.
I love my Chromebook for work though. It does everything I need to do, including having multiple document windows open for multi-tasking.
Chrome OS is built on a multi-task model. You can have many windows open at once and quickly switch between them without losing state or visibility.
Windows tried to merge the two with Windows 8 and it was a terrible user experience. The last thing I want for my dual 24" monitors is to be able to only use one window at a time. Having a messaging app take up the entire monitor is ridiculous. Hopefully they'll find a middle ground. Until user multi-tasking exists in Android I won't be using it for anything but my phone.
I advise against the use of the term "multitasking" to mean anything other than OS/unit of schedulable work multitasking, which is the proper meaning. The same happened to "real-time", and generally having technical terms with concrete meanings be watered down isn't preferable. Multiple workspaces is really what Android lacks.
Would be really interesting to see some serious productivity studies done on this. Not to pick on you -- I appreciate you insight -- but humans don't do multi-tasking well.
I wonder (and have no idea, just throwing the idea out there), if people would be more productive in that single tasking environment.
Seems everyone here is panicking because they think that this means Chrome OS will be killed and Android will be made to run on Chromebooks - but I actually think the signs point to the opposite - Chrome OS becoming the Phone/Tablet OS under a new guise. I wouldn't read too much into a leak filtered through journalists, and instead look at what Google's actually working on:
- Google has Chromium developers working on a DART-based Mobile UI framework and execution engine, Flutter (http://flutter.io/). It's looking to be far better than the existing Android UI system - built for touch and 120fps from the start. This uses the Dartium VM and a bridge to allow the DART apps to use all the native features of the platform, it's much more than just another web framework. Development on this is very active right now, clearly a sizable team working fulltime - and they're building new developer tools also. There was a talk on this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnIWl33YMwA .
- Google has built a Runtime to allow existing Android Java-based apps to run on Chrome OS, and is currently testing this and working with developers to get their apps to run on it. It doesn't make much sense to invest in building that out just for chromebooks, since the experience on a Chromebook with Android apps is pretty awful (can't resize etc), but it makes total sense if it's going to be how legacy Java/Android apps run on the new Chrome based phone OS.
The sad truth is that Android simply isn't a very well engineered system - it's been improved over time, but problems persist - like the complex update process leading to unsatisfied users and security problems, poor UI performance (even now, Android can barely do simple animations at a steady 60fps on the latest Nexus devices, and has little hope of allowing for the beautiful animations the Material Design team has come up with), and poor battery life. Google's also at a dead-end with Java given the ongoing legal battles, and with Apache Harmony dead they have to maintain the standard library implementation themselves.
On the other hand, Chrome OS performs great, has awesome battery life on Chromebooks, is quite possibly the most secure end-user OS ever, and Chromebooks get speedy updates for at least 5 years. I know which one I'd choose as the basis for a merged OS.
Update 7:40PM: We've updated the article's headline to be more accurate. A Google spokesperson has confirmed to The Verge that both Chrome OS and Android will continue to exist; Chrome OS is not being "killed."
Mixed feelings on this. As someone with two Chromebooks (one Pixel, one Samsung ARM Chromebook) , an Android phone, and two Android tablets, here's what I see as the potential benefits and tradeoffs:
+ Being able to run Android apps on a Chromebook would be awesome. There's already some limited support for this, but it would be nice for it to be official.
+ Taking over the Chromebook line would hopefully force Google to make document editing not suck on Android devices.
+ Android running on Chromebooks will hopefully make the display scale better on hi-DPI devices.
- ChromeOS is fairly lightweight and actually runs surprisingly well on cheap devices. I have no doubt that my Chromebook Pixel would run Android just fine, but the Samsung ARM Chromebook would probably chug, even though it's running ChromeOS well enough.
- Making Android run on laptops will hopefully make Google step up their Android document editing game, but as of right now it still sucks. Even the cheap Samsung chromebook was leagues ahead of using my tablet and a bluetooth keyboard in terms of trying to compose documents.
- The ability to install crouton on Chromebooks and have another Linux chroot on the side is an awesome feature of the Chromebook. I imagine that might be more difficult under Android, even though it still uses the linux kernel.
Took'em a while but better late than never I suppose. I have long been saying (on various forums :)) that this is the right approach.
Flash is dying off and if Android gets better desktop window manager and shell (the bar is already set too low - ChromeOS sucked with its stupid everything including WiFi settings in Chrome, tiny fonts and web-only apps) people will finally have a credible alternative to Windows desktops/laptops. Plus this gives Google a chance to do something like Continuum - without having to be beholden to x86 for apps like MS.
Interesting development! Apple is taking "two separate platforms" approach while Microsoft and Google want to blend desktop and mobile. If you think about it makes sense. Microsoft and Google are going after a world were you pay for a cheap ARM device and it does work as desktop and mobile for you but Apple is going after customers who can pay for multiple devices.
But one thing is for sure, ARM is coming to desktop computing!
I'd take this a step further and summarize the strategy as:
Google: Blend devices so the experience is seamless, tracking across devices is unbroken, and get as much reach as possible with the free OS
MS: Blend devices so the experience is seamless, tracking across devices is unbroken, and then ultimately once people are sufficiently bought in, switch the OS to a fully subscription-based model with strong lock-in
Apple: Best experience for each unique device with strong ties between them because they make their money on the devices.
The only real difference with mobile versus desktop computing is the human interface. There are immense cost savings to be had in merging the operating systems for Apple devices if you can manage the code well enough; I'd be surprised if they don't eventually at least try to combine iOS and OSX.
Even if they aren't officially moving to one OS, Apple seems to be "blending" too. The past several Mac OS releases have made it behave more similarly to their mobile OS in ways that, on their own terms, made the desktop user experience worse, for example changing the default mouse scrolling direction (to make it like "dragging" on a phone) and removing the ability to show time remaining for the battery instead of percentage.
Google wants to be in the enterprise market. Microsoft dominates the enterprise market right now, and they're doing a lot of things (Surface, Windows 10, Office 365, Azure) to extend their dominance. If you look at new versions of Office and don't see anything new in there for you, it's because you're not looking at the collaborative space. Microsoft is pulling the rug out from under Google Docs (which for some reason Google rebranded as Google Drive because they're so terrible at naming things) by adding anything Google's services have over Office AND having backwards compatibility with current Office docs. Google can't match that. Apple meanwhile has the MacBook line, which was and may still be the laptop to beat in the ultrabook space. They also have the iPhone, which is the top dog for people who can afford them, and the iPad, which has dominated the tablet space in terms of productivity. (Android is dominating the tablet space for consumption, but that doesn't help nearly as much in terms of enterprise).
The move to convertible devices is being driven by and catering to enterprise users. Microsoft is in the lead here with the Surface, and they're trying to extend this to their phones but they may not be able to overcome the handicap of nobody wants their phones. Apple is playing from behind here because there's walls between iOS and OS X that they won't cross, but they have inroads into the enterprise space, they have enough native iOS productivity apps that work well on tablets (Adobe and ironically Microsoft are both heavily into the iOS productivy app space, and that's a huge part of the market) that the iPad Pro is... unappealing to me personally but quite possibly will be successful in the marketplace.
Google has... Chromebooks, which have no apps and no market penetration outside of the very, very captive education market (where IT administrators just want computers so locked down that teenagers can't do too much damage). And they have Android, which (in tablets at least) has almost no enterprise penetration and very little in terms of productivity apps. And the merging of ChromeOS with Android in order to tackle the enterprise market and the Surface line and the iPad Pro makes a lot of sense. But I'm not sure either papers over the other's flaws enough to make it viable, and I'm definitely not convinced that they're going to be able to be combined in a way that incorporates what ChromeOS does well that Android doesn't, like system software updates.
I've used a Chromebook as my machine for the last 18 months. I love it.
Anything I need to do, I can do through web services, remote desktop or chrome remote desktop.
The one thing I have come to love about ChromeOS is the security. I don't need to worry as much and I have confidence in using my Chromebook all the time.
My phone is android and maybe I am just suffering from Verizon abuse, but I've never had the same security confidence with my phone. And I think this will be the issue. Most people only know Android through a phone experience and it's left a bad taste in their mouth.
Anyway, the Google folks are smart. My hope is the security and reliability of ChromeOS is what is taken and folded into Android.
Seems like the expected development, when I first saw Ubuntu's presentation slides for Ubuntu in all things it really struck me that this was the way things would go. At the Microsoft Windows 10 event their ability to make it morph on multiple form factors seemed like they had done a lot of work to have the whole "phone tablet desktp" thing work everywhere. The challenges of maintaining multiple stacks has got to be huge.
So this is a good move for Google, ideally they cut down the infighting between the two groups, get rid of the lower 5% of both groups leaving them with a combined, more effective group with a well defined mission.
It will be interesting to see if they can make enough money at it though.
Will be interesting to see just what form the combined OS takes, particularly which elements from ChromeOS carry over.
It's notable that iOS and Android still don't have native support for composing declarative UIs, notwithstanding marvelous hacks like React Native. Web technologies aren't perfect, but the use of markup for UI with well-integrated APIs is something that WebOS, FirefoxOS, etc got right a long time ago. It doesn't even have to be HTML... look at QML.
I'm hoping that Android will take on some of those characteristics, and not subsume ChromeOS without a trace.
I really hope this actually means "full" Chrome (as in, plugins, chrome apps, all the rest) and "full" windowing capabilities are coming to Android and not just that Google is cancelling ChromeOS and using some renaming and tweaks to Chrome on Android as a fig leaf to pretend otherwise.
The rumours about Android app support for ChromeOS were more promising. I'm able to get a lot of functionality out of my chromebook, exclusively due to the crouton extension. I've gotten through most of an electrical engineering degree on ChomeOS including developing android apps, writing and deploying javascript apps, and using ROS and PCL. I'm afraid this change will nix all of these, and I'll have to get a Mac to keep some UNIX functionality and maintain a rock-solid web-browsing experience. Not excited about that.
ChromeOS is nothing but Linux with persistence sandboxed by default. All of its apps are nothing but webapps wrapped in a desktop app launcher ala Google Web Toolkit.
Merging with Android means nothing really, unless they plan to replace java-based Android apps with a runtime that natively supports webapps.
Lets call this what it really is. Alphabet/Google is killing any project that doesn't directly contribute revenue via advertising or Google Play sales.
I wonder how Microsoft will respond to this? Come July 2016 will Microsoft really stop the free upgrade from 7/8 to 10 or will they just make Windows free to consumers? Obviously there will still be a (small) charge to OEMs and for business users they will still charge for the Pro and Enterprise versions but I think it is time for Windows Home to become free.
Lots of public schools are using Chromebooks. Aspects of the Chrome OS model are key features and justifications for it. As a taxpayer and parent in a school district that buys a lot of Chromebooks, this is an irritating pivot and feels like strategy tax because Chrome OS was the more visionary and future-forward model. I have a feeling that a not-insignificant portion of America's pubic education system was betting on it.
(edit: I know Sundar and Google are extraordinarily brilliant and know what they're doing...I am just envisioning Pixel C type devices, and this isn't the direction I think anyone thought Chromebooks were headed. I'll try to be more optimistic!)
Oh, and it seems the story was completely fabricated by the WSJ. So we got one and a half paragraphs of lies, and a bunch of advice on how to read the rest of the lies in the article that may or may not work anymore...
As a FirefoxOS user, I'm excited to hear this news, in the hopes that eventually people will realize that HTML+CSS+JS is not a terrible stand-in for a full-fledged OS (iOS/Android), depending on the task.
Since its inception, Chrome OS has made security a focus and put a large amount of work into it, everything from bootloaders to Linux kernel features such as seccomp-BPF and KASLR, to complement the existing high security of Chrome itself. It also borrows Chrome's silent and fast update mechanism, allowing for frequent security updates. Its sandbox may feel somewhat limiting, but for those who do manage to stay within it, Chrome OS is probably the most secure desktop platform in common use.
Meanwhile, even if Android's update issues were somehow solved, it has a pretty bad security reputation even apart from that, with a long list of historical vulnerabilities which could be basically said to stem from a lack of priority given to it (e.g. from designs which, while not inherently insecure, unnecessarily open up attack surface that could be eliminated with a better design, such as in the case of the "master key" vulnerabilities; or just from crappy code, such as binder - whether caused by lack of auditing or just lack of security awareness among its authors I don't know, but both can be considered part of making security a priority). Maybe things have gotten better, and I don't have that much experience with Android, but there is simply no comparison between the general Android app sandbox (which allows native code) and what you get under Chrome with NaCl and such. The latter isn't perfect (as I know, because I've exploited it repeatedly), but the attack surface to examine for bugs is just much smaller than on other systems. I'm not really giving it any justice with this brief description.
I guess that if you're especially worried about security you could just only use Chrome on Android, and not install or use any other apps, and that would get you most of the way there. Indeed, if you do so, you can still have access to the Chrome Web Store's paltry selection of apps - it's cross-platform, you don't have to go for the OS designed around it...
But essentially nobody will do that. And even if they did, the recent Stagefright vulnerabilities demonstrate the difficulty of accounting for every potential attack surface on an OS, and thus the benefit of having the OS engineers design the lockdown rather than the user coming up with something ad-hoc. (Plus, today at least, even under Chrome's sandbox, Android's version of the Linux kernel is not as secure as Chrome OS's. And again, this is all assuming Android slow update problem is solved, which is a pretty big assumption considering how long it's been around; if it isn't, that's already enough to basically doom platform security.)
So if Chrome OS is really folded into Android, the end result, I think, will be the destruction in practice of something that was really quite unique in the security world. Maybe I shouldn't be so pessimistic - after all, those same security engineers could now work on Android. But I am, because even if work is done on it, the platform just comes from such a different place that it would be hard to make the same.
[+] [-] rdl|10 years ago|reply
This is a horrible day for security.
[+] [-] cwyers|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mikeb85|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DominikR|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|10 years ago|reply
Desktop OSes are generally pretty bad. Unsandboxed Windows and OS X apps can do an awful lot with your computer.
[+] [-] melling|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] irascible|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gopowerranger|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Periodic|10 years ago|reply
I've tried using an Android tablet for work. It's nigh impossible, even with a keyboard because it doesn't support multi-tasking well. Sure, it supports OS multi-tasking, but it doesn't support user multi-tasking.
Android is based around the single-task model. You have a foreground app that takes up the entire screen and other apps are backgrounded. You can switch between apps fairly quickly, but you can only have one open at a time. There are some attempts to fix this, such as Samsung's split-screen, but none are officially supported. We've even moved to having Chrome tabs use this model.
I love my Chromebook for work though. It does everything I need to do, including having multiple document windows open for multi-tasking.
Chrome OS is built on a multi-task model. You can have many windows open at once and quickly switch between them without losing state or visibility.
Windows tried to merge the two with Windows 8 and it was a terrible user experience. The last thing I want for my dual 24" monitors is to be able to only use one window at a time. Having a messaging app take up the entire monitor is ridiculous. Hopefully they'll find a middle ground. Until user multi-tasking exists in Android I won't be using it for anything but my phone.
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notjoedimaggio|10 years ago|reply
I wonder (and have no idea, just throwing the idea out there), if people would be more productive in that single tasking environment.
[+] [-] jordanthoms|10 years ago|reply
- Google has Chromium developers working on a DART-based Mobile UI framework and execution engine, Flutter (http://flutter.io/). It's looking to be far better than the existing Android UI system - built for touch and 120fps from the start. This uses the Dartium VM and a bridge to allow the DART apps to use all the native features of the platform, it's much more than just another web framework. Development on this is very active right now, clearly a sizable team working fulltime - and they're building new developer tools also. There was a talk on this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnIWl33YMwA .
- Google has built a Runtime to allow existing Android Java-based apps to run on Chrome OS, and is currently testing this and working with developers to get their apps to run on it. It doesn't make much sense to invest in building that out just for chromebooks, since the experience on a Chromebook with Android apps is pretty awful (can't resize etc), but it makes total sense if it's going to be how legacy Java/Android apps run on the new Chrome based phone OS.
The sad truth is that Android simply isn't a very well engineered system - it's been improved over time, but problems persist - like the complex update process leading to unsatisfied users and security problems, poor UI performance (even now, Android can barely do simple animations at a steady 60fps on the latest Nexus devices, and has little hope of allowing for the beautiful animations the Material Design team has come up with), and poor battery life. Google's also at a dead-end with Java given the ongoing legal battles, and with Apache Harmony dead they have to maintain the standard library implementation themselves.
On the other hand, Chrome OS performs great, has awesome battery life on Chromebooks, is quite possibly the most secure end-user OS ever, and Chromebooks get speedy updates for at least 5 years. I know which one I'd choose as the basis for a merged OS.
[+] [-] patrickaljord|10 years ago|reply
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/29/9639950/google-combining-...
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|10 years ago|reply
+ Being able to run Android apps on a Chromebook would be awesome. There's already some limited support for this, but it would be nice for it to be official.
+ Taking over the Chromebook line would hopefully force Google to make document editing not suck on Android devices.
+ Android running on Chromebooks will hopefully make the display scale better on hi-DPI devices.
- ChromeOS is fairly lightweight and actually runs surprisingly well on cheap devices. I have no doubt that my Chromebook Pixel would run Android just fine, but the Samsung ARM Chromebook would probably chug, even though it's running ChromeOS well enough.
- Making Android run on laptops will hopefully make Google step up their Android document editing game, but as of right now it still sucks. Even the cheap Samsung chromebook was leagues ahead of using my tablet and a bluetooth keyboard in terms of trying to compose documents.
- The ability to install crouton on Chromebooks and have another Linux chroot on the side is an awesome feature of the Chromebook. I imagine that might be more difficult under Android, even though it still uses the linux kernel.
[+] [-] blinkingled|10 years ago|reply
Flash is dying off and if Android gets better desktop window manager and shell (the bar is already set too low - ChromeOS sucked with its stupid everything including WiFi settings in Chrome, tiny fonts and web-only apps) people will finally have a credible alternative to Windows desktops/laptops. Plus this gives Google a chance to do something like Continuum - without having to be beholden to x86 for apps like MS.
[+] [-] msoad|10 years ago|reply
But one thing is for sure, ARM is coming to desktop computing!
[+] [-] shostack|10 years ago|reply
Google: Blend devices so the experience is seamless, tracking across devices is unbroken, and get as much reach as possible with the free OS
MS: Blend devices so the experience is seamless, tracking across devices is unbroken, and then ultimately once people are sufficiently bought in, switch the OS to a fully subscription-based model with strong lock-in
Apple: Best experience for each unique device with strong ties between them because they make their money on the devices.
[+] [-] onion2k|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobbyi_settv|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achalkley|10 years ago|reply
Yep and Apple's new MacBook and iPad Pro are a sign of Apple's future doing this.
[+] [-] reddotX|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exacube|10 years ago|reply
how well does a full-fledged Chrome on ARM perform? Does it even exist?
[+] [-] cwyers|10 years ago|reply
The move to convertible devices is being driven by and catering to enterprise users. Microsoft is in the lead here with the Surface, and they're trying to extend this to their phones but they may not be able to overcome the handicap of nobody wants their phones. Apple is playing from behind here because there's walls between iOS and OS X that they won't cross, but they have inroads into the enterprise space, they have enough native iOS productivity apps that work well on tablets (Adobe and ironically Microsoft are both heavily into the iOS productivy app space, and that's a huge part of the market) that the iPad Pro is... unappealing to me personally but quite possibly will be successful in the marketplace.
Google has... Chromebooks, which have no apps and no market penetration outside of the very, very captive education market (where IT administrators just want computers so locked down that teenagers can't do too much damage). And they have Android, which (in tablets at least) has almost no enterprise penetration and very little in terms of productivity apps. And the merging of ChromeOS with Android in order to tackle the enterprise market and the Surface line and the iPad Pro makes a lot of sense. But I'm not sure either papers over the other's flaws enough to make it viable, and I'm definitely not convinced that they're going to be able to be combined in a way that incorporates what ChromeOS does well that Android doesn't, like system software updates.
[+] [-] pgrote|10 years ago|reply
Anything I need to do, I can do through web services, remote desktop or chrome remote desktop.
The one thing I have come to love about ChromeOS is the security. I don't need to worry as much and I have confidence in using my Chromebook all the time.
My phone is android and maybe I am just suffering from Verizon abuse, but I've never had the same security confidence with my phone. And I think this will be the issue. Most people only know Android through a phone experience and it's left a bad taste in their mouth.
Anyway, the Google folks are smart. My hope is the security and reliability of ChromeOS is what is taken and folded into Android.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|10 years ago|reply
So this is a good move for Google, ideally they cut down the infighting between the two groups, get rid of the lower 5% of both groups leaving them with a combined, more effective group with a well defined mission.
It will be interesting to see if they can make enough money at it though.
[+] [-] jallmann|10 years ago|reply
It's notable that iOS and Android still don't have native support for composing declarative UIs, notwithstanding marvelous hacks like React Native. Web technologies aren't perfect, but the use of markup for UI with well-integrated APIs is something that WebOS, FirefoxOS, etc got right a long time ago. It doesn't even have to be HTML... look at QML.
I'm hoping that Android will take on some of those characteristics, and not subsume ChromeOS without a trace.
[+] [-] shmerl|10 years ago|reply
The last thing we need is Android expanding to desktop and causing even further rift.
[+] [-] zmmmmm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skoocda|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocky1138|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EvanPlaice|10 years ago|reply
Merging with Android means nothing really, unless they plan to replace java-based Android apps with a runtime that natively supports webapps.
Lets call this what it really is. Alphabet/Google is killing any project that doesn't directly contribute revenue via advertising or Google Play sales.
[+] [-] kozukumi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spinchange|10 years ago|reply
(edit: I know Sundar and Google are extraordinarily brilliant and know what they're doing...I am just envisioning Pixel C type devices, and this isn't the direction I think anyone thought Chromebooks were headed. I'll try to be more optimistic!)
[+] [-] billybilly1920|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsimpson|10 years ago|reply
You can either find the same article in Google News; use a bookmarklet like Wait, Google Sent Me; or read The Verge's rehash of the WSJ article.
[+] [-] melling|10 years ago|reply
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/09/14/hacker-news-faq-1-ho...
[+] [-] billybilly1920|10 years ago|reply
thanks
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comex|10 years ago|reply
Since its inception, Chrome OS has made security a focus and put a large amount of work into it, everything from bootloaders to Linux kernel features such as seccomp-BPF and KASLR, to complement the existing high security of Chrome itself. It also borrows Chrome's silent and fast update mechanism, allowing for frequent security updates. Its sandbox may feel somewhat limiting, but for those who do manage to stay within it, Chrome OS is probably the most secure desktop platform in common use.
Meanwhile, even if Android's update issues were somehow solved, it has a pretty bad security reputation even apart from that, with a long list of historical vulnerabilities which could be basically said to stem from a lack of priority given to it (e.g. from designs which, while not inherently insecure, unnecessarily open up attack surface that could be eliminated with a better design, such as in the case of the "master key" vulnerabilities; or just from crappy code, such as binder - whether caused by lack of auditing or just lack of security awareness among its authors I don't know, but both can be considered part of making security a priority). Maybe things have gotten better, and I don't have that much experience with Android, but there is simply no comparison between the general Android app sandbox (which allows native code) and what you get under Chrome with NaCl and such. The latter isn't perfect (as I know, because I've exploited it repeatedly), but the attack surface to examine for bugs is just much smaller than on other systems. I'm not really giving it any justice with this brief description.
I guess that if you're especially worried about security you could just only use Chrome on Android, and not install or use any other apps, and that would get you most of the way there. Indeed, if you do so, you can still have access to the Chrome Web Store's paltry selection of apps - it's cross-platform, you don't have to go for the OS designed around it...
But essentially nobody will do that. And even if they did, the recent Stagefright vulnerabilities demonstrate the difficulty of accounting for every potential attack surface on an OS, and thus the benefit of having the OS engineers design the lockdown rather than the user coming up with something ad-hoc. (Plus, today at least, even under Chrome's sandbox, Android's version of the Linux kernel is not as secure as Chrome OS's. And again, this is all assuming Android slow update problem is solved, which is a pretty big assumption considering how long it's been around; if it isn't, that's already enough to basically doom platform security.)
So if Chrome OS is really folded into Android, the end result, I think, will be the destruction in practice of something that was really quite unique in the security world. Maybe I shouldn't be so pessimistic - after all, those same security engineers could now work on Android. But I am, because even if work is done on it, the platform just comes from such a different place that it would be hard to make the same.