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So Chrome's not just a browser but a window manager too?

joecool1029 4y ago
Yeah, that was kind of the point of them moving to Aura. More details on it: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-desktop-window-manager/ https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-de...
seanp2k2 4y ago
Browsers are de-facto windows managers in the unfortunate world we've created where everything is a webapp with 5% of the perf that it'd have as a native app.
- jancsika 4y ago
  Everything-as-a-web-app is not good. However... I didn't measure it, but switching tabs in an Asus C201 Chromebook sure seemed to have a much lower latency than tab switching (or clicking on a different app in a menubar) for any Linux distro I've ever used on any piece of hardware. That includes this Dell XPS laptop running Ubuntu, which is fast and well-supported with firmware. I speculate without measuring because switching browser tabs on that Chromebook feels uncanny. It's as if there's some ahead-of-time trick that utilizes the camera to guess my impending trackpad click or keystroke. That makes me think I've gotten used to a fairly high floor of latency on my Linux machines. Add to that the long battery life while browsing in Chrome. Add to that the fact that I open and close that Chromebook at will with the browser in nearly any state, and it never got hot, crashed, or failed to come back up when I reopened it[1]. Those things being true, it makes more sense from a performance standpoint to use Linux from within Chrome than the other way around. That is-- as long as you spend non-trivial time in a browser, it's more efficient to do Linux-Inside-Chrome than Chrome-Running-Inside-Linux. (And I have never found a Linux Firefox config on any piece of hardware that can reliably play videos on Reddit, which makes me think it's not handling video acceleration properly.) 1: The one exception: when I was running a low-latency audio app on that Chromebook which grabbed exclusive control of ALSA.
marcthe12 4y ago
Yep. Web browsers are new Xorg(In more way then most people realize. I wonder at this point, we could make web browsers some X Wayland style daemon.
- mdtusz 4y ago
  This is sorta how many "embedded" systems with a display work these days. Start a chromium window in kiosk mode at boot and use a webapp for the UI. You'd be surprised how many touchscreens out in the world do exactly this.
ayewo 4y ago
You are close. “It's an operating system (pretending to be a browser).” [1] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14737739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14737739 from a past discussion of building Chrome “24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse”
vinkelhake 4y ago
It depends on what we mean when we say "Chrome". When the chrome binary is built for ChromeOS, it includes a shell called "ash". It's got a window manager, virtual desks, app launcher, login screen and more. The fact that this all lives in a binary called "chrome" and uses a nontrivial amount of the flags that this post is about is in some ways a historical artifact. The source for it is here [1]. None of that stuff is included in a regular desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux) build of Chrome. [1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ash https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ash

Yeah, that was kind of the point of them moving to Aura. More details on it: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-desktop-window-manager/ https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-de...

seanp2k2 4y ago

Browsers are de-facto windows managers in the unfortunate world we've created where everything is a webapp with 5% of the perf that it'd have as a native app.

jancsika 4y ago
Everything-as-a-web-app is not good. However... I didn't measure it, but switching tabs in an Asus C201 Chromebook sure seemed to have a much lower latency than tab switching (or clicking on a different app in a menubar) for any Linux distro I've ever used on any piece of hardware. That includes this Dell XPS laptop running Ubuntu, which is fast and well-supported with firmware. I speculate without measuring because switching browser tabs on that Chromebook feels uncanny. It's as if there's some ahead-of-time trick that utilizes the camera to guess my impending trackpad click or keystroke. That makes me think I've gotten used to a fairly high floor of latency on my Linux machines. Add to that the long battery life while browsing in Chrome. Add to that the fact that I open and close that Chromebook at will with the browser in nearly any state, and it never got hot, crashed, or failed to come back up when I reopened it[1]. Those things being true, it makes more sense from a performance standpoint to use Linux from within Chrome than the other way around. That is-- as long as you spend non-trivial time in a browser, it's more efficient to do Linux-Inside-Chrome than Chrome-Running-Inside-Linux. (And I have never found a Linux Firefox config on any piece of hardware that can reliably play videos on Reddit, which makes me think it's not handling video acceleration properly.) 1: The one exception: when I was running a low-latency audio app on that Chromebook which grabbed exclusive control of ALSA.

marcthe12 4y ago

Yep. Web browsers are new Xorg(In more way then most people realize. I wonder at this point, we could make web browsers some X Wayland style daemon.

mdtusz 4y ago
This is sorta how many "embedded" systems with a display work these days. Start a chromium window in kiosk mode at boot and use a webapp for the UI. You'd be surprised how many touchscreens out in the world do exactly this.

ayewo 4y ago

You are close. “It's an operating system (pretending to be a browser).” [1] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14737739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14737739 from a past discussion of building Chrome “24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse”

vinkelhake 4y ago

It depends on what we mean when we say "Chrome". When the chrome binary is built for ChromeOS, it includes a shell called "ash". It's got a window manager, virtual desks, app launcher, login screen and more. The fact that this all lives in a binary called "chrome" and uses a nontrivial amount of the flags that this post is about is in some ways a historical artifact. The source for it is here [1]. None of that stuff is included in a regular desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux) build of Chrome. [1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ash https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ash