Turns out, supporting Mozilla’s firefox project wasn’t good enough for Google: they’ve got their own shiny new browser called Chrome now. It was all over the newspaper headlines today. Most commentaries featured it as “The return of the browser wars”. Funny as it seems that Web 2.0 finally brought us browser war 2.0, my prediction is that we will look at it from a different angle in retrospect: It’s another important step to kill our old fashioned notion of an operating system. The interesting thing about Chrome is the new virtual machine included. It’s called V8 and has been developed by guys who already created the the Java virtual machine for SUN.
So don’t compare Chrome to Internet Explorer – compare it to Midori.
Midori is a rumoured strategic project at Microsoft –a serious operating system beyond Windows. It seems to be more than a research study, though there is little official information. SD Times claimed that “Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors.” An operating platform rather than operating system, allowing us to make use of all those multicore-processors, multiprocessor-machines and multi-machine computing clouds.
In the old days, there was a single hardware, a single CPU, and a single operating system. On top of that, many applications could be executed. Things started to change with the Java virtual machine (JVM). Now the Java software effectively ran on the JVM, ignoring the underlying OS. Then there was virtualization: today, you can easily run several OS on a single computer using vmware. Sometimes, virtual machines are already used to eliminate unexpected interactions between applications: We got enough computing power to deploy less trusted applications into their own virtual machines – so we do it and eliminate hard to locate side effects. Who knows – we might just as well end up with each application running within its own VM. Now Google gives us V8 – the new operating platform included in their browser. Applications like Google Apps will use it as their operating platform and ignore the underlying OS. Others will continue to develop Flex application running on Adobe’s Flash-plug-in. Different platform, same thing.
And parallel computing on the desktop has just begun. It will add to the trend. In the future, a single hardware will have multiple CPUs with even more cores, and any number of operating platforms layered on top of it. It’s going to solve some compatibility issues and create a number of new ones: keeping all those layers of operating platforms up to date, for example.
Chrome’s V8 will be one of those operating platforms. Thus, Google moves from controlling the entrance to cyberspace to controlling the entrance to the V8 operating platform. It’s the next step beyond cyberspace.
“Burning Chrome” is a collection of short stories by Sci-Fi author William Gibson. It was published following his novel “Neuromancer” in which he coined the term “cyberspace”. So yes, Chrome is the logical next step after cyberspace.
