ChromeOS, another step in the direction of “the web, everywhere”

• In: Blog
• By: John
• July 10, 2009

There’s probably little to be added to the gigabytes of responses to Google’s announcement a couple of days back of their “ChromeOS”.

As with the Palm Pre, if not more so, as the announcement says “For application developers, the web is the platform”.

I said a few days ago, have done so for a long time, and will I am sure continue to do so for some time to come - increasingly, the way we develop user experiences, regardless of where they will be seen, will be with web technologies - principally HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Silverlight, Flash, and similar technologies like JavaFX will have their place - but all of these have their challenges.

ChromeOS runs on top of Linux. There is Mono, an open source implementation of Silverlight, but there is no official Microsoft implementation of Silverlight for Linux, so while traditionally Linux has been a small player when it comes to mainstream user focussed computing, if ChromeOS is successful, that will change. And the lack of a first class implementation of Silverlight for Linux would then be a considerable stumbling block to its widespread adoption.

Flash, while available on almost all web enabled and connected devices, including Linux based devices, has, due to Apple’s current decision making, the challenge of not being available on the single most widely used mobile web enabled device. the iPhone.

Will the launch of ChromeOS push Microsoft to develop a Linux version of Silverlight? When will we see Flash on the iPhone? And will the investment of thousands of developers in “native” iPhone apps ultimately be an evolutionary deadend, as an increasingly diverse mobile web ecosystem means the only feasible way to build an application that targets Windows based netbooks (sorry “low cost small notebook PCs.” ;-)) “traditional” Linux based netbooks, ChromeOS base netbooks, Android based netbooks and phones, Nokia S60 based devices, Palm webOS based devices, iPhone and other OS X based devices, the Nintendo DS family, and so on is a technology that runs on all of these devices?

Over a decade ago, there was much rejoicing that Java would offer us the opportunity to “write once, run everywhere” (which quickly became, as the joke would have it, “write once, debug everywhere”). And that was in the days of a couple of operating systems, running on devices with very similar user experiences.

I’m not sure why there isn’t a lot more excitement that HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and related web technologies are becoming in reality “write once, run everywhere”, not just in terms of the devices they’ll run on, but also in terms of the flexibility they provide to create appropriate user experiences on very varied devices with the same core code. As a software developer with well over 20 years experience, to me, nothing short of a miracle is happening under our noses - the fact that it has crept up on us over a decade or more is perhaps what has accustomed us to what should be seen as something extraordinary.

In the meantime, web developers and designers, you can rest assured, your skills will be increasing demand - so keep them honed. We’ll be joined by many more folks over the coming months and years.

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