Google goes in search of an instant operating system

NEWS that Sony would be installing Google’s Chrome browser on its sleek, if pricey, Vaio laptops instead of the ubiquitous Internet Explorer from Microsoft has prompted your correspondent to re-examine the internet-search company’s foray into the world of web browsers and operating systems. The announcement came just as he began to notice how the latest version of Mozilla’s highly regarded Firefox browser was dragging its feet.

From cold, it was taking anything from 20 to 25 seconds for Firefox 3.5 to load his home page. Even Internet Explorer 8 was five seconds nimbler. Opera 10, the latest version of an old favourite from Norway, was faster still. But Chrome 3 blew everything away, loading the home page in half Firefox’s time. Once they had been started from cold and had loaded their innards into memory, all four browsers could be restarted and load the home page in five seconds or so.
Of course, Chrome is still a bare-bones browser, while Firefox is a powerful piece of software that can be configured in a multitude of ways that make it safer and easier to use. However, to make the (admittedly unscientific) comparison more meaningful, all but a handful of Firefox’s add-ons and extensions were turned off. Even so, it was trounced by Chrome.

A ten-second difference in loading time ought not to matter. After all, most people these days keep their browsers running, open or minimised, for the duration of the session. But loading times say much about a program’s inner architecture, how efficiently it has been coded and the way it uses computer memory.

Loading times can also be a guide to a program’s robustness and resistance to attack. At the annual CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver last March, the year-old Chrome was the only browser left standing after stalwarts like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Apple’s Safari had been hacked to pieces—Safari in literally seconds—by security experts.

Throughout their brief history, browsers have basically done just one thing: serve up pages of information for people to read. But the web has evolved dramatically over the past two decades while browsers have lagged behind. Today, the web is about applications rather than pages. People use the web to play games, download music, buy things, make telephone calls, share pictures and inner secrets, watch videos and television and, oh yes, search for information.

To catch up, the first thing Google did was abandon the browser’s traditional architecture. Instead of uniting the user with the web in a single protected area, Chrome uses a “sandbox” approach that gives each application its own space to play in, which makes it harder for bad guys to wrestle control.

In Chrome, the main part of the program, the kernel, is separated from the various rendering processes that draw the pages on the screen. That way, the browser kernel—which interacts directly with the operating system—is shielded from anything questionable lurking outside. Meanwhile, the rendering engine resides in a special space that controls what resources within the computer can be read or written to. In so doing, viruses, Trojans, key-loggers and spyware are prevented from infecting the computer.

The last time he wrote about such things, your correspondent fretted that, as the migration of computer applications from the desktop to the web (or “cloud” as it is now known) gathers pace, more and more of our personal and professional lives will be filtered through our browsers (see “Browser wars are back”, March 27th). So, they had better be a lot more secure than they have been to date.

One reader perceptively noted that the security problem was mainly a legacy issue. In other words, the fundamental flaws in computer programs will remain as long as people insist that each new version of software be compatible with the previous one. The only answer is to start from scratch.

That seems to be the thought behind Chrome OS, a minimalist operating system that Google announced it was working on a couple of months ago. All that has leaked out so far is that it is based on the Chrome web browser and the Linux kernel, and designed mainly for lightweight laptops known as netbooks. The aim is to provide users with an instant way of accessing the web without the hassle and delay of a heavyweight operating system like Windows or Macintosh OS X.

Chrome OS is designed primarily to work with applications such as e-mail, word-processors, calendars and the like that are stored in the cloud rather than on a user’s hard-drive. Google has already developed the software, called Gears, that lets a browser run such web-based applications. Gears is built into Google Chrome but can just as easily be added to other browsers.

To transform Chrome and Gears into a lightweight operating system, Google will have replaced the rest of Linux with a slimmed down windowing and application manager that integrates with Chrome and Gears for running applications on the web and with the Linux kernel for running the computer hardware. That is no trivial exercise.

But it has been done before. Several times, in fact. Jolicloud is a French development which likewise uses bits of Linux that have been tweaked to run on netbooks with tiny screens and limited storage. But instead of using Google’s Gears, Jolicloud relies on Mozilla’s Prism and Firefox to run various web-based applications.

However, one of the most impressive instant operating systems yet has to be the gOS Cloud produced by Good OS of Los Angeles. While doing voluntary teaching work a couple of years ago, your correspondent refurbished some old computers for kids to take home (see “Life after cyber-death”, January 11th 2008). Of all the free operating systems his then ten-year-old daughter tested for the revitalised machines, the most child-friendly by far was gOS—a Linux distribution used in an Everex desktop computer that Wal-Mart sold for $199.

The attraction of gOS was the way it worked seamlessly with Google Apps—the search company’s free online alternative to Microsoft Office. Ever since, your correspondent has kept a copy of this clever Linux distribution (gOS 3.1 Gadgets is the latest version) on one of his office machines to remind him of what, with luck, the future could look like.