"The Spoon kernel is a lightweight implementation of core operating system APIs, including the filesystem, registry, process, and threading subsystems, completely implemented within the user-mode space, allowing Spoon apps to be executed without any device driver installation or administrative privileges."
Two thoughts:
1. Wow, I cannot imagine how much work it would be to fake all the necessary Windows APIs for this to work.
2. IT managers everywhere should be afraid. Very afraid.
Although to be fair to Wine they have had to build the entire stack - as far as I can see this only runs on Windows. Presumably emulating the Windows APIs on Windows is a lot easier than emulating them on a completely different underlying platform.
Why should IT Managers fear this? From looking at their site it is very similar in concept to Citrix, which is already widely used. The browser plug-in is still needed so that provides some measure of control.
If people are able to install the browser plug-in then they could probably install the applications directly.
One of my clients is government-funded and can get into trouble if they have licensing issues with their software. Their employees, meanwhile, have a tendency to not fully review the EULAs for software they download. For that and other reasons, we're about to revoke admin privileges on their workstations.
This would pretty much circumvent that.
So, yeah. I can see how IT managers might not be looking forward to this. (But, that's their job.)
"Virtual OS in the browser" sounds like the best business and consumer product. the stuff practically sells itself. If they haven't done much since 2007, I am left to wonder how well do they actually work.
No, Chrome Frame for IE is a way to swap out the rendering engine used by IE. It replaces the IE layout engine with Chrome's WebKit-based layout engine.
I hadn't even considered the possibility that they implemented that part themselves. I just assumed they were using something like Crossover as part of their product. Now that is impressive.
I'm curious if they are technically allowed to distribute IE though.
I still have the old versions saved that did not need any of their "library" installed which leads me to believe that this new approach is just a control mechanism to make you visit their site.
It's a shame their IE9 doesn't work on XP though, that would be a real coup.
I've been using spoon.net on and off for cross-browser testing for about 2 years. It's a decent product, but remarkably unstable. It's very common by the middle of the day that you I be able to launch an app from within Spoon, and if I look in the task manager, there is around 8 spoon.net processes locked up and using 100 odd megs of ram each. YMMV, but I've had this on many separate installs. To be honest, this situation has gotten bad enough that most of the time I just run separate machines with different IE versions and access them via RDP. When it works, however, it is very impressive.
I am running IE6, 7 and 8 in parallel on the same windows install. Properly, without IETester and its glitches.
As a web developer, this is a pretty awesome find. Basically, it means that instead of needing to run 3 VirtualBoxes (4, soon), one for each version of IE, I can now run just one, thus saving me a gig of RAM and a lot of performance.
Just be careful. I've used to test against their IE6 and few things (CSS related) weren't working. Had to use MS own virtual IE6 for a more proper rendering.
There's also MultipleIEs (http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE) -- I have it installed on a VirtualBox to run IE6 beside IE8. I mostly use it to test jQuery/JavaScript code and it suffices.
I want to know how much Spoon Studio costs so I click the buy button and it wants me to register and login? I clicked around a little more but I couldn't find the cost.
Unfortunately it doesn't work on my Mac either, on my Windows machine though it was really cool to see IE6 pop up!
The issue I have with these app virtualisation technologies is that they all seem to work on the same pricing model: expensive user licenses are required, which pretty much dictates how I -as the developer- should sell and price the applications I distribute.
It's cool technology that could be very useful in solving all sorts of deployment issues, but it's way too expensive.
Having to track, pay and manage these royalties/user licenses offsets -at my lowly ISV level- any benefit these products may offer.
I have been using this for doing the browser compatibility testing. I use it on my windows machine. Its simple and works great..It worked better that IE tester. The only problem I noticed so far was, my anti virus( AVG) treats this as a virus and pops multiple messages.
Two thoughts:
1. Wow, I cannot imagine how much work it would be to fake all the necessary Windows APIs for this to work.
2. IT managers everywhere should be afraid. Very afraid.