

Chrome OS update adds Google's hardware-accelerated Aura UI - aeurielesn
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/10/2937941/chrome-os-aura-ui-hardware-acceleration-update

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MatthewPhillips
I had a chance to play around with it and these are my thoughts:

It's definitely pretty. The animations are fairly smooth on the Series 5,
which is surprising because the Atom processor chokes on a lot of big
websites.

Unfortunately I don't think this greatly helps your productivity while using
Chrome OS. It's more convenient for having multiple windows. Perhaps if you
were doing some writing in Google Docs you could have 1 window for your
writing and research, then another for when you want to take a break. That
makes sense. However it seems, and I could be wrong on this, that when you
open a new app it opens in a tab within whatever window you were last using.

It feels like something that was designed purely as a "how do we abstract away
windows management" and not about usability. They need to do something to make
apps be real apps, meaning no tab chrome _at all_. And they need to
intelligently find a way to do that. So perhaps apps launched from the home
screen will default to launching in a new window without any chrome, and they
would need a good way for multitasking from there (the auto-hide bar is a fair
start).

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currywurst
I really don't get why ChromeOS should exist .. wouldn't an Android tablet
with a keyboard (e.g. Asus Transformer) be a much better choice?

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cryptoz
Google started work on ChromeOS before Android became successful in the market
and long before it arrived on tablets. Additionally, I don't think Google
really wants everybody on an OS that runs native apps. Their speciality is the
web. Their money comes from the web and the more time people spend searching
and browsing the more money they make. ChromeOS is probably what they wish
everybody were using, but they aren't going to ignore Android's success.

They'll keep building ChromeOS to hedge their bets. They can't risk getting
shoved out of the OS game in any way.

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MatthewPhillips
I would have agreed with you if this was the Google of 4 years ago, but I
think the faction of the company that thinks web-first is either gone or
silenced. Android has the worst support for web apps as first class apps of
any of the major mobile OSes.

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Drbble
They were just bizarrely slow in porting Chrome to Android. With Chrome on
Android, the Chrome Web Store follows.

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fierarul
>Unfortunately, early-adopting Cr-48 owners are out of luck — the build of
Chrome OS in question is only for Acer AC700 and Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks.

I found this quite funny considering the Cr-48 owners got them for free.

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epicviking
The comments on that article really make me appreciate hacker news. I had
forgotten how bad internet comments could be.

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canthonytucci
The terminal, which used to be a full screen affair has been missing from the
last few dev builds (haven't tried this one yet so I can't say if it is back
yet). But being able to use it alongside a page I'm working on would be great.
Maybe someone who has given it a try can chime in.

Also, Does anyone know if this has any snapping/splitting/keyboard support (a
la TMUX/Awesome WM/StumpWM)?

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abrowne
Supposedly it's back now/recently (I haven't tried either):
[http://www.chromiumosforge.com/2012/04/crosh-is-back-
google-...](http://www.chromiumosforge.com/2012/04/crosh-is-back-google-docs-
offline.html)

~~~
canthonytucci
Gave it a try and it is now inside a tab, and works pretty well.

* ctrl-w tries to close the window, which meant I needed to remap "change window" in vim from ctrl-ww...not a huge issue, but it was an annoyance. Ctrl-v is ctrl-shift-v so they seemed to get some things right, but not all ChromeOS is pretty bad about key remapping, I'm still holding out for a way to change ctrl-h to backspace (as God intended it) instead of this useless history being brought up.

Enjoying the rest of the update, there are in fact split screen snapping (and
the ability to resize both open windows at the same time). here's hoping for
keyboard shortcuts (I'm not holding my breath).

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wittekm
Dumb question: so is this just a lightweight X11 WM or is it a brand new
windowing system? Or just some sort of directfb hack-job?

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keeguon
Judging from the wikipedia page it says it's a new WM but looking here:
[http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/platform/window...](http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/platform/window_manager.git;a=tree)
there's clearly some bits borrowed from x11.

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bengoodger
It's not just a new X WM, though we do still use X (at the screen level).
Basically, we render everything inside the X root window. It's all composited,
using the same compositor we use for web content ("CC").

<http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura> <\-- somewhat old,
but you can get the gist.

ChromeOS used to have an X window manager (which is what your link is pointing
to, the code used in M18 and earlier). The cool thing about the new code is
that it runs in Chrome, so it's much easier for more engineers to test and
develop for, and it's also platform agnostic (since the only X interface is at
the host layer). This means Windows developers like myself can work on
ChromeOS WM features since I can effectively build and run the ChromeOS WM on
Windows.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Wow, that's a really cool idea!

Hey wait, could you do that in Metro? Then we could have "Chrome OS" inside
Windows 8...

