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Google is working on integrating terminal emulator into Chrome
- maxwell_smart 15y agoWhy? This seems like the perfect thing for an NaCl application.
- xorglorb 15y agoNaCl doesn't have the low level networking capabilities needed for SSH, Telnet, etc. because they would be a security risk (a "game" could run a portscanner or look for open SMB shares on the network).
- tree_of_item 15y agoIt might be a bad idea to put too many eggs in to the NaCl basket, as other browser vendors are resisting it pretty strongly.
- barrybe 15y agoNaCl is nice and all, but it's better to have something that works perfectly fine on top of Javascript/HTML5, rather than only inside NaCl.
- cheald 15y agoHTML5/Javascript can't do raw socket operations, which is the big obvious downside here.
- wmf 15y agoNaCl intentionally has the same sandbox, same security model, and same I/O capabilities as JS. In this case, NaCl would still be limited to XHR or WebSocket.
- cheald 15y agoAh, I didn't know that. How does naclssh do it, then? It seemed like it was going far more low-level than the standard sandboxed security.
- calcnerd256 15y agobut a proxy can
- bdonlan 15y agoSure, but they can also add a new API for raw socket operations.
- burgerbrain 15y agoThis would undoubtedly be a bad idea. There is a reason it doesn't already exist.
- bdonlan 15y agoI'm not saying open it up to just anything, but if this is for ChromeOS, they could certainly grant access to manually-installed extensions (not extension gallery extensions) and/or to OS components.
- krallja 15y ago"Install this app* to get 10 free cows in FarmVille!" * Note: App may include port scanner. Do not look directly into the operational end of the port scanner.
- mindcrime 15y agoSounds like the perfect thing for a JNLP app to me.
- scrod 15y agoShhh, now that embedded Java does everything we need, we must pretend it no longer exists — how else could we justify all the insane technological contortions that we'll need in order to justify profiting through sequestering users' data, renting 1980s-era features to them, and selling their attention, intimate habits, and social bonds to advertisers?
- 01111000 15y agoWell said. Things really need to break out of the browser to see big gains in performance. Smart users will eventually see this. But that won't stop developers from trying to move everything inside of it. It's probably easier to build a browser user base than an OS user base.
- bokchoi 15y agoThe MindTerm ssh2 applet has been around for a very long time: http://www.cryptzone.com/products/agmindterm/ http://www.cryptzone.com/products/agmindterm/
- cheald 15y agohttp://code.google.com/p/naclssh/source/browse/src/naclssh/ssh.js?spec=svn234050d9cc8d9a63cb87da590ae3cb4904d2d95b&r=234050d9cc8d9a63cb87da590ae3cb4904d2d95b http://code.google.com/p/naclssh/source/browse/src/naclssh/s... :)
- jjcm 15y agoI personally would love to have a terminal or an SSH client within chrome. I'm excited to see how this turns out.
- selectnull 15y agoI agree, this is exciting. I just hope, if they implement terminal withing chrome, when one presses ctrl+p it will select previous command from buffer, and not print the page. I enjoy working in chrome devtools, I use it just like a shell and love it... and then I press ctrl+p and get all frustrated...
- kodablah 15y agoThere is a not-extremely-active SSH in NaCl [1]. This emulator is a prerequisite for it being added [2] [1] http://code.google.com/p/naclssh/ http://code.google.com/p/naclssh/ [2] http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=23272 http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=23272
- chimeracoder 15y agoThat could have interesting implications for the Chrome Notebook (I haven't really used one, but based on what I've heard). The potential appeal of the Chrome notebook is its security-by-simplicity. If the only thing you can do is use Chromium, then your notebook is basically as secure as Chromium itself is (in theory, at least). The irony is that we're essentially moving back to the way computers were a few decades ago - people used terminals to access a central computer. We moved to personal desktop computers for a while, then laptops (and mobile phones). It'll be interesting to see if the rise of interest in 'cloud computing' means that, in five years, our primary computers will just be portable terminals to access some main computer remotely. Personally, I might be fine with that. Network speeds/reliability aside, everything I do could be accomplished easily over SSH, with X forwarding for a few applications. It's possible that these simple tools that we've had for decades could be packaged in a way that appeals to a more general use case.
- freehunter 15y agoBack in the early days of ChromeOS, there was a much less restricted security model than I presume exists today based on what I'm reading. I haven't use it in a while, though, so I do not know how it works these days. Basically when I installed it, it had to be compiled by you and installed on an SD card. You could easily change a setting on the system and drop to a shell. It was running on a stripped-down Ubuntu installation, so you could actually install Firefox inside of ChromeOS. It was nice having the base, fast-boot installation combined with the ability to basically run a full system if you needed to.
- benmathes 15y agoI hope we go the way of the dumb terminal from an ease-of-use standpoint; I want my data to just "be", and not have to worry about syncing/backups/etc. From the freedom/privacy standpoint, however, I'm not sure. I find it surprisingly easy to imagine a US government agency empowered by anti-terror laws to get access to my data. This is why I want encrypted cloud computing for all my stuff. I dunno if the large players could actually do that and have the US govt be ok with it.
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- zobzu 15y agoChrome is the ChromeOS ;-) I'm wondering whats the intended use tho? Start ssh and the like from the webpage? scared
- phogster 15y agoI'd imagine the address bar itself would accept the ssh:// protocol.
- spolsky 15y agoFor those of you too young to remember, all the early web browsers supported telnet: URLs, usually launching an external telnet client.
- sp332 15y agoAt least Firefox still does. Actually it supports any foo:// protocol if you're willing to configure an external program to handle it :) Edit: instructions here http://kb.mozillazine.org/Register_protocol http://kb.mozillazine.org/Register_protocol
- mkramlich 15y agoI have a vague memory of using a telnet URL in a browser to play a text-only MUD back in the 90's. Was exotic compared to the default way of doing it in a terminal shell session.
- ryanackley 15y agoThis appears to be specifically for chromium OS not the Chrome browser. If you look at the commit message it references a chromium-os bug. http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=23271 http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=23271 If you're interested in the long term plans for this feature just see all the bugs for this component http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/list?q=label:Area-TerminalEmulator http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/list?q=label:Are...
- oacgnol 15y agoCombining a terminal emulator with Google Sync would be really cool to have - terminal settings that sync just like any other preference or bookmark.
- Uchikoma 15y agoMy Chrome is getting buggier all the time (now in version 15). Tabs hang, websites crash. So to be selfish: Instead of adding a terminal emulator, I want my Chrome from 2 years ago back, which was fast, bug free and did not hang.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- peteforde 15y agoI came here to say exactly this. Chrome should try and remove features, not add things nobody is asking for.
- jgroome 15y ago>Chrome should try and remove features, not add things nobody is asking for. Can you be a little more specific as to what kind of thing should be removed? I've noticed a definite difference in speed, but I wouldn't say the browser is bloated.
- Pewpewarrows 15y agoThis just in: there are a massive amount of developers working on a single project. Not all of them are on the stability team. Just because they're adding feature X doesn't mean that they're taking any amount of resources away from bugfix Y. It's a false dichotomy typically imagined by those who have never worked on medium to large-sized products.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoIt would be false if he had said no work on stability was happening. However, new features come with a cost in stability (both through introduced errors and less manpower on the stability teams). Google has been putting a lot of features in (nacl, dart, etc) and it is coming at the expense of the basic browsing experience. Interesting that as Mozilla figures out it needs to focus on the basics after getting slammed by the smaller, faster Chrome, Google does the exact same thing they did.
- abbot2 15y agoI guess, the next notable iteration would be: "Google is working on integrating Emacs into Chrome". Oh well.
- antifuchs 15y agoThis announcement reminded me too of when Linus commented (upon the integration of virtual memory into Linux) that Linux had become the Emacs of terminal emulators. Pretty funny that by integrating a Terminal emulator, Chrome becomes the Emacs of web browsers.
- rajat 15y agoWe can already do everything from inside emacs; oh wait! Chrome's the browser. So that's completely different.
- sgrove 15y agoThere's actually a really interesting article/email I read a long time ago saying that emacs main competitor was the browser, and that it was likely to be overtaken by it unless emacs reacted in some way. I can't find the article with a cursory google search right now, but maybe someone else knows it can find it.
- 20after4 15y agoI believe that would be Yegge's rant from 2008: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/xemacs-is-dead-long-live-xemacs.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/xemacs-is-dead-long-... Scroll down a bit to the heading "The bad news: the competition isn't the IDEs" "IDEs are draining users away, but it's not the classic fat-client IDEs that are ultimately going to kill Emacs. It's the browsers. They have all the power of a fat-client platform and all the flexibility of a dynamic system. I said earlier that Firefox wants to be Emacs. It should be obvious that Emacs also wants to be Firefox. Each has what the other lacks, and together they're pretty damn close to the ultimate software package. "
- sgrove 15y agoYup, that's it! Thank you. I love being able to tap into collective memory :) It strikes me as true though, step by step we're moving functionality to the browser. In some ways it feels great, but in others it's terrifying - the thought of this (and the next) generation poorly re-implementing emacs in the browser...
- Someone 15y agoGoogle or someone at Google? I cannot figure that out from that page, and I do not see a business reason for doing it. Or is this intended to be the software equivalent of JTAG on Chrome OS? What am I missing?
- figital 15y agoMakes sense. Using the console to query information about what's going on inside Chromium's processes is already similar to the "shell experience". (This might explain why recent Chromium builds have gone from 45MB to 235MB!!)
- smashing 15y agoDoes anyone remember Konqueror has a webbrowser/file browser methodology of handling protocols such as SFTP through IOSlaves called FISH? I know Konqueror shares a codebase with Chromium through the KHTML renderer and maybe more, but maybe Google's Chrome is dipping into the well of ideas that comes from the KDE project but using a different implementation, of course.
- andrewcooke 15y agono-one seems to have mentioned it, but this is apparently motivated by the aura project - http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-desktop-window-manager http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-des... you can see the link via: http://codereview.chromium.org/8680034/#ps11001 http://codereview.chromium.org/8680034/#ps11001 which links to bug http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=23271 http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=23271 which blocks http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=21187 http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=21187 which is "important to the Aura effort"
- timmy-turner 15y agoFor those that can't wait for google, there are already some pretty mature browser-based terminals out there. For example shellinabox (https://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ https://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/) which is a full javascript implementation of a vt100 compatible terminal plus a server written in C providing pty streams over http. Web shell (http://code.google.com/p/web-shell/ http://code.google.com/p/web-shell/) is another one, doing all the terminal emulation on the server written in python and transferring full lines to the browser. If you're interested to write your own terminal emulator, have look at pyte (https://github.com/selectel/pyte https://github.com/selectel/pyte), a very clean and beautiful python library to write vtxxx compatible terminal emulators.
- gaius 15y agoI am getting a weird sense of deja vu - Netscape included a 3270 emulator with the browser back in the '90s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270
- jimktrains2 15y agoBut they can't make it so that you can view the source without loading the page -_-
- Kwpolska 15y agoIf you want to read the source, and even edit it, I suggest using the Chrome Web Inspector. Ctrl-Shift-I or ⌘-Option-I.
- tuukkah 15y agoAnyone still remember XMLterm that was included in the Mozilla browser in year 2000 or so :-) http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/06/07/xmlterm/index.html http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/06/07/xmlterm/index.html
- obtu 15y agoHah, it looks a lot like TermKit!