7 ms·

Google is no longer bringing the full Chrome browser to Fuchsia

89 points by tech234a 3y ago

CodeCompost 3y ago
Ok, so Fuchsia is not the Linux killer we were worried about.
- dmitrygr 3y ago
  It never was. it was a staff retention project from the start. It walked like that, quacked like that, and smelled like that...
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    What is a "staff retention project"? Companies don't generally spin up 400-employee divisions just so they can keep hold of employees. This was clearly intended to eventually replace Android and ChromeOS. The layoffs are likely because someone high up freaked out about how many people were working on a very very long term strategic project. I would guess dropping native Chrome is because it's a ton of work and they don't need it, at least not for a long time. They can use Flutter for embedded devices, and if they support Android they can just run Chrome for Android.
    - dmitrygr 3y ago
      > Companies don't generally spin up 400-employee divisions just so they can keep hold of employees. Back in ZIRP days, Google did. I was there and saw it firsthand. Were you? I know the initial team that started this. Very smart folks. But there was never a shred of future there. When they tried to convince me to join the team, there was no answer to my question of "who would use this and why?". Android compat would never happen without a vm or container (in which case all the fancy privilege control is useless since all the sensitive data is INSIDE the container that MUST act linux-like and not fancy-priviledge-separation-like). And nobody would rewrite all the apps of the world to fit the new paradigm, as seen by chrome dropping this target finally, and by the failure of much-better-sponsored windows phone OS. Given that even the team had no clear answer to what they were doing and why, yes, the conclusion is that they were permitted to do this just to keep them off market to competitors, and available should they be needed elsewhere at Google. This also explains why there were layoffs in the team once the free money ended, and it expains this article here too.
      - dmazzoni 3y ago
        I was at Google then too. I had the same questions when I was asked to work on the team or even just collaborate with the team on Chrome support. I think it would have been fine to just throw the Android runtime in a container. That wouldn't be useless - it was still a great opportunity to reinvent the kernel and the Linux driver model, and all of the other parts of the system. I find the "staff retention" thing confusing. Sure, I understand talented people want some freedom and flexibility, but I don't think that having a team of 400+ people go crazy for years with no plan is the only way to retain. Why not let them go crazy for a while but then force them to downscope, pick a real need and solve it with their tech? Or, why not make it more incubator-style? Instead of a team of 400, have 10 teams of 40 and give them a year to build something amazing, then turn only the top 1 or 2 into products and send the others back to the drawing board?
        dmitrygr 3y ago
        > but then force them You worked at google. Would you say that serious top-down leadership with a vision existed in the age of Sundar? I spent time in ChromeOS and Android teams. Almost 8 years of time. The actual teams had some vision and plans, but there was NOTHING from above. So yes, it is quite believable to me. Imagine: fuchsia team wanted to fuck around for funsies. Nobody above stopped it. It is so google 2012+
      - o11c 3y ago
        > Android compat would never happen without a vm or container (in which case all the fancy privilege control is useless since all the sensitive data is INSIDE the container that MUST act linux-like and not fancy-priviledge-separation-like). VM-per-app has very real possibilities. You'd need some new logic for things like keyboard apps, but ...
        dmitrygr 3y ago
        And for binder… permissions management… inter-app comms. Share sheets. and all other APIs… yeah… no. Not with the architecture of Android
    - dmazzoni 3y ago
      > This was clearly intended to eventually replace Android and ChromeOS I worked at Google (on the Chrome team) for years while Fuchsia was getting started. Replacing Android and Chrome OS would have made so much sense, but they were definitely NOT trying to do that. I never understood why. They had a great plan for an OS that lived in a complete vacuum, with absolutely no plan to gain adoption or transition any existing platform to it. It was literally tech for the sake of tech, and it made no sense.
      - medstrom 3y ago
        Can't speak for management, but they could've seen it as funding open-ended research. Give a bunch of nerds freedom from shipping dates, deadlines, adoption plans, customer demands, and other such things that they always complain about, then see what they come up with. It's expected that this kind of strategy will yield nothing most of the time, but eventually you get a positive Black Swan.
      - IshKebab 3y ago
        > Replacing Android and Chrome OS would have made so much sense, but they were definitely NOT trying to do that. I never understood why. Are you sure? In my experience people often say that project X isn't intended to replace project Y when it absolutely is, in order to avoid having to fight the people working on project Y. An open source example of this is WASM. When it first appeared there were countless "wasm isn't intended to replace JavaScript" claims. Of course it 100% was (for a number of use cases anyway), but people had to say that to placate the JS fanatics. It looks like Google potted ART to Fuchsia at one point.
        dmitrygr 3y ago
        ART is a compiler. Its main OS interaction is file access. I can port it to MS-DOS for you in a week of free time. What will that prove?
- spankalee 3y ago
  But why would you be worried about it? The world having a great open source microkernel-based OS is a _good_ thing.
  - acdha 3y ago
    This is true in some abstract sense but the value really goes up dramatically if more than a few people actually use it. There’s a strong feedback loop around having drivers or being able to run common code, and that’s why many people were hoping that Google had a strategy since there aren’t that many projects with the resources to push through the early iterations of those problems.
  - rossy 3y ago
    I don't think having a great liberally-licenced microkernel-based OS is as good for the world in a practical sense compared to forcing every Android and Chromebook vendor to publish the changes they made to a copyleft monolithic kernel. I can totally understand being worried that the rise of Fuchsia would result in a dark age for running alternative open source OSes on cheap consumer smartphones, SBCs and ARM64 laptops.
    - google234123 3y ago
      Vendors don’t publish source code now lol
      - rossy 3y ago
        Some do. If the current state of things is what happens when vendors are required to publish their source by law, imagine how much worse it would be if they weren't - there'd be nothing. What little we have of FOSS OSes on cheap consumer devices would be gone. Imagine no LineageOS, no community-supported postmarketOS devices, no installing mainline Linux on old Chromebooks etc.
acdha 3y ago
Given the history of layoffs, I am afraid that one day soon we’ll be reading about Fuchsia being dropped. It was always ambitious but it’s not the kind of project modern Google seems capable of committing to.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  Layoffs? Recency bias. I think you mean given Google’s much more established history of ditching things when they see something shiny.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    The weird thing about Fuchsia is that it's been public for at least eight years. In that time Google has gone through several messaging apps - like, launched them, got bored with them, launched a successor, and killed the original, multiple times over. All for an OS they only shipped on one weird voice-assistant-with-a-screen appliance.
    - Ferret7446 3y ago
      They rebranded their messaging app several times. I doubt the guts of the backend/protocol changed all that much.
  - acdha 3y ago
    In general, yes, but I was thinking specifically about how hard that division was hit last year. This kind of thing can become self-fulfilling and since it’s not tightly coupled to revenue I’d be worried if I worked there, which is never good for productivity.
- poisonborz 3y ago
  Google would not be able to create any of the products now that made it what it is today. It's the classic IBM playbook.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
datadeft 3y ago
Fuchsia to be added to the dead Google projects list. 3..2..1
slowhadoken 3y ago
Is google waiting to get purchased by Microsoft or something? I don’t understand what they’re turning into at this point.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  My guess is that you just thought ahead further than anybody in their executive team has in quite a while.
  - slowhadoken 3y ago
    I've been told I'm too smart for my own good. I mean based on whatever people think good is these days.
- gryn 3y ago
  it's turning into your regular company run by bean counters, nothing surprising a lot of companies become like this with time.
  - slowhadoken 3y ago
    Yeah, it's really sad. I feel like Elon Musk is fighting that downward trajectory towards mediocrity but he's punished daily for it so it must be hard to resists. I guess when you get as big as Google you get tangled in economic and governmental obligations. It's a real Letterman-Chappelle situation.
- rodgerd 3y ago
  They have a laundry list of anti-trust investigations lined up against Apple for "anything Apple do better than Google" so it appears that they will be resting on their browser, search, video, and mapping monopolies which are funded by their ad duopoly, and using the US government to force competitors to hand their products over to Google.
  - slowhadoken 3y ago
    I really don't know how business works at that high of a level. I'm not sure how much of it is for show and make believe at a federal level and how much of it is an actual dirty fight. I've never found a coherent book on the subject.
ramesh31 3y ago
Pathetic. The last remaining gasp of any chance at anything innovative ever coming from Google again, over a decade of work, being tossed out to juice some quarterly numbers.
- skinkestek 3y ago
  Thankfully Google has become lame. And this is coming from someone who cheered for Google until I guess 2012, then gave them up but defended them until maybe 2017 - 2019 somewhere and now just hope they are never recovers. Let them go the way of IBM: continue to exist without threatening general purpose computing.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
It's been clear for a while that Google was de-emphasizing the importance of Fuchsia. Chrome dropping support kind of rules it out as a viable OS for any consumer device. Next up is probably a proper shutdown of the team. Aside from some Nest thingies, did anything else ever launch with Fuchsia? Does it have any relevance for any server side stuff that Google does internally? My guess is that what happened is that they failed to get OEMs enthusiastic about Fuchsia. At least I assume the likes of Samsung would not be super excited about giving away control of even more of their stack to Google. And I don't think it's a recent thing either; this likely became pretty clear years ago and the project has been slowly dying ever since.
- klooney 3y ago
  Yeah- the license and single-source-of-developers mean that Fuchsia has looked like a Trojan horse to competitors.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Which it probably would have been, Google regrets giving so much control to OEMs with android and they won't do that again with new development. They locked down wear os a lot more too. But with android it's hard to take back what they've given already. Meaning the OEMs will not be as happy to take fuchsia on board. Not for its technical merits but for the new start under new rules it will imply. The only way for Google to force them would be to discontinue Android which would be very risky. People could fork it, it would put their marketshare at risk of competitors and it would take years to get the app gap with ios closed again as they'd be starting from zero. As a privacy-conscious user I'd worry more about whether the licence permits something like lineage to exist based on fuchsia. I'm sure it's more secure but more under the control of Google too who I'd put into the adversary camp. I wouldn't use it until it was first cleaned of spyware by projects like graphene or lineage. I'm not sure if the license permits this.
spankalee 3y ago
This is pretty disappointing, but the writing was already on the wall for any desktop-ish version of Fuchsia. I do hope it somehow still replaces the Android core someday, maybe just running the Android Chrome via Starnix. It's a bummer because Fuchsia takes everything we've learned from automatic software updates, devices that run untrusted and semi-trusted code, proprietary drivers in a OSS kernel, devices whose manufactures aren't compelled to update them, the unsuitability of the user-based security model, containers, and more and applied it to a new kernel and OS. Fuchsia is more or less exactly the kind of trust-nothing OS architecture I want to run as an end user and as a developer who has to run a lot of random 3rd-party code locally.
pjmlp 3y ago
By now it is clear that Fuchsia will eventually follow Brillo and Android Things footsteps. It is a shame, Fuchsia has a lot of cool ideas, I guess by having Binder, Android IPC for Treble drivers with a microkernel like approach, and Rust integration, kind of keeps some of Fuchsia's ideas on Android, leaving little else for Fuchsia, other than replacing the Linux kernel.
belval 3y ago
I feel like the AI debacle with Google having no good answer to ChatGPT was only the tip of the iceberg and it's becoming clear that the company does not have a good leadership structure in place. Some blame Sundar, personally I have no idea if it's true but it's sad to see a company that seemed so bleeding edge slowly decay like that.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Don’t they? Based on their benchmarks Gemini Ultra is supposed to be better than chatGPT. I guess we’ll wait and see when it comes out this year.
  - belval 3y ago
    It's supposed to be, but GPT-4 was released almost a full year ago now.
  - acdha 3y ago
    We’ll see how it compares but also a single technical success does not make a successful business, and it doesn’t replace a strategy. OpenAI has a ton of interest right now but is also losing a lot of money annually, and a lot of AI products are hitting pain points around reliability and security which are going to require significant advances to overcome. Google appears to be flailing around trying to find something which will work, and given how much of this technology they invented that is really a strong argument for better management.
dmazzoni 3y ago
I worked at Google (on the Chrome team) at the time Fuchsia was started and for many years after that. The team had some of Google's most brilliant engineers working on it. Technically, they had some really impressive stuff. However, I don't think anyone was ever able to articulate to me its path to success. In other words - let's say you build an amazing, powerful new operating system. How do you actually get anyone to adopt it? What frustrated me is that there wasn't even an answer for Android or Chrome OS. Why build a new operating system that wouldn't even be relevant or useful for those, the two platforms that Google had total 100% control over? If I had been in charge of the world, I would have taken a more pragmatic approach. Chrome OS was the obvious first target - it was built on Linux but it didn't have to be. The operating system really only has a tiny number of native binaries that need to run on it: * Chrome * The Chrome OS GUI (which shares a lot of code with Chrome but is distinct) * The Android VM * A Linux VM If you port those four to run on another operating system, then you're done. You could start shipping Chrome OS devices based on that new OS. I think it also would have been reasonable to have a goal to port Android to run on it, basically replace the Linux kernel. Probably it would have been necessary to add some Linux compatibility layer to enable Linux drivers for some number of years, with the goal of eventually shipping devices that don't require Linux. But the Fuchsia team wanted to build a complete operating system from scratch, including a whole new GUI, a whole new developer SDK, and more. Why??? When they were finally forced to ship something useful, they shipped the Nest Hub, which in my opinion was a big mistake. The Nest Hub based on Fuchsia does absolutely nothing that the previous one didn't do. It basically took a relatively simple, easy product and increased its maintenance burden by 100x while providing no value. If they had chosen Chrome OS instead it could have actually provided some value in terms of performance, security, modularity, and developer APIs. It just seems like such a waste of talent to try to reinvent everything with no plan for adoption, rather than building more incrementally and actually shipping.
- spankalee 3y ago
  I think they may have thought that if they built something great that "management" would make the other teams adopt Fuchsia at the core somehow. Of course other teams just develop a defensive stance and guard against that politically and, as Android has done, by adopting their ideas. The later is good actually, since incremental changes are so more likely to land and stick.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The article keeps talking about the Chrome Browser on Fuschia being discontinued & the end of Workstation. > At first, the shift from workstation to workbench seems like a simple name change, but the subsequent discontinuation of Chrome for Fuchsia all but confirms that Google does not intend to release a desktop/mobile device directly powered by Fuchsia in the foreseeable future. But then it turns around and says what seems to be: oh, but the web view will still be maintained! > Importantly, this move has no implications for the Nest Hub lineup, which will continue to receive updates and support web-based features as normal. Giving up on Chrome as an app, a full browser with user experience - that's one thing. But if the web engine is still alive & maintained, that feels like a fairly reversible choice. It's hard to imagine Fuschia persisting without a web engine, but that doesn't seem like what the pile of inferences in this article is saying!

89 points by tech234a 3y ago

CodeCompost 3y ago

Ok, so Fuchsia is not the Linux killer we were worried about.

dmitrygr 3y ago
It never was. it was a staff retention project from the start. It walked like that, quacked like that, and smelled like that...
- IshKebab 3y ago
  What is a "staff retention project"? Companies don't generally spin up 400-employee divisions just so they can keep hold of employees. This was clearly intended to eventually replace Android and ChromeOS. The layoffs are likely because someone high up freaked out about how many people were working on a very very long term strategic project. I would guess dropping native Chrome is because it's a ton of work and they don't need it, at least not for a long time. They can use Flutter for embedded devices, and if they support Android they can just run Chrome for Android.
  - dmitrygr 3y ago
    > Companies don't generally spin up 400-employee divisions just so they can keep hold of employees. Back in ZIRP days, Google did. I was there and saw it firsthand. Were you? I know the initial team that started this. Very smart folks. But there was never a shred of future there. When they tried to convince me to join the team, there was no answer to my question of "who would use this and why?". Android compat would never happen without a vm or container (in which case all the fancy privilege control is useless since all the sensitive data is INSIDE the container that MUST act linux-like and not fancy-priviledge-separation-like). And nobody would rewrite all the apps of the world to fit the new paradigm, as seen by chrome dropping this target finally, and by the failure of much-better-sponsored windows phone OS. Given that even the team had no clear answer to what they were doing and why, yes, the conclusion is that they were permitted to do this just to keep them off market to competitors, and available should they be needed elsewhere at Google. This also explains why there were layoffs in the team once the free money ended, and it expains this article here too.
    - dmazzoni 3y ago
      I was at Google then too. I had the same questions when I was asked to work on the team or even just collaborate with the team on Chrome support. I think it would have been fine to just throw the Android runtime in a container. That wouldn't be useless - it was still a great opportunity to reinvent the kernel and the Linux driver model, and all of the other parts of the system. I find the "staff retention" thing confusing. Sure, I understand talented people want some freedom and flexibility, but I don't think that having a team of 400+ people go crazy for years with no plan is the only way to retain. Why not let them go crazy for a while but then force them to downscope, pick a real need and solve it with their tech? Or, why not make it more incubator-style? Instead of a team of 400, have 10 teams of 40 and give them a year to build something amazing, then turn only the top 1 or 2 into products and send the others back to the drawing board?
      - dmitrygr 3y ago
        > but then force them You worked at google. Would you say that serious top-down leadership with a vision existed in the age of Sundar? I spent time in ChromeOS and Android teams. Almost 8 years of time. The actual teams had some vision and plans, but there was NOTHING from above. So yes, it is quite believable to me. Imagine: fuchsia team wanted to fuck around for funsies. Nobody above stopped it. It is so google 2012+
    - o11c 3y ago
      > Android compat would never happen without a vm or container (in which case all the fancy privilege control is useless since all the sensitive data is INSIDE the container that MUST act linux-like and not fancy-priviledge-separation-like). VM-per-app has very real possibilities. You'd need some new logic for things like keyboard apps, but ...
      - dmitrygr 3y ago
        And for binder… permissions management… inter-app comms. Share sheets. and all other APIs… yeah… no. Not with the architecture of Android
  - dmazzoni 3y ago
    > This was clearly intended to eventually replace Android and ChromeOS I worked at Google (on the Chrome team) for years while Fuchsia was getting started. Replacing Android and Chrome OS would have made so much sense, but they were definitely NOT trying to do that. I never understood why. They had a great plan for an OS that lived in a complete vacuum, with absolutely no plan to gain adoption or transition any existing platform to it. It was literally tech for the sake of tech, and it made no sense.
    - medstrom 3y ago
      Can't speak for management, but they could've seen it as funding open-ended research. Give a bunch of nerds freedom from shipping dates, deadlines, adoption plans, customer demands, and other such things that they always complain about, then see what they come up with. It's expected that this kind of strategy will yield nothing most of the time, but eventually you get a positive Black Swan.
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      > Replacing Android and Chrome OS would have made so much sense, but they were definitely NOT trying to do that. I never understood why. Are you sure? In my experience people often say that project X isn't intended to replace project Y when it absolutely is, in order to avoid having to fight the people working on project Y. An open source example of this is WASM. When it first appeared there were countless "wasm isn't intended to replace JavaScript" claims. Of course it 100% was (for a number of use cases anyway), but people had to say that to placate the JS fanatics. It looks like Google potted ART to Fuchsia at one point.
      - dmitrygr 3y ago
        ART is a compiler. Its main OS interaction is file access. I can port it to MS-DOS for you in a week of free time. What will that prove?
spankalee 3y ago
But why would you be worried about it? The world having a great open source microkernel-based OS is a _good_ thing.
- acdha 3y ago
  This is true in some abstract sense but the value really goes up dramatically if more than a few people actually use it. There’s a strong feedback loop around having drivers or being able to run common code, and that’s why many people were hoping that Google had a strategy since there aren’t that many projects with the resources to push through the early iterations of those problems.
- rossy 3y ago
  I don't think having a great liberally-licenced microkernel-based OS is as good for the world in a practical sense compared to forcing every Android and Chromebook vendor to publish the changes they made to a copyleft monolithic kernel. I can totally understand being worried that the rise of Fuchsia would result in a dark age for running alternative open source OSes on cheap consumer smartphones, SBCs and ARM64 laptops.
  - google234123 3y ago
    Vendors don’t publish source code now lol
    - rossy 3y ago
      Some do. If the current state of things is what happens when vendors are required to publish their source by law, imagine how much worse it would be if they weren't - there'd be nothing. What little we have of FOSS OSes on cheap consumer devices would be gone. Imagine no LineageOS, no community-supported postmarketOS devices, no installing mainline Linux on old Chromebooks etc.

acdha 3y ago

Given the history of layoffs, I am afraid that one day soon we’ll be reading about Fuchsia being dropped. It was always ambitious but it’s not the kind of project modern Google seems capable of committing to.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
Layoffs? Recency bias. I think you mean given Google’s much more established history of ditching things when they see something shiny.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  The weird thing about Fuchsia is that it's been public for at least eight years. In that time Google has gone through several messaging apps - like, launched them, got bored with them, launched a successor, and killed the original, multiple times over. All for an OS they only shipped on one weird voice-assistant-with-a-screen appliance.
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    They rebranded their messaging app several times. I doubt the guts of the backend/protocol changed all that much.
- acdha 3y ago
  In general, yes, but I was thinking specifically about how hard that division was hit last year. This kind of thing can become self-fulfilling and since it’s not tightly coupled to revenue I’d be worried if I worked there, which is never good for productivity.
poisonborz 3y ago
Google would not be able to create any of the products now that made it what it is today. It's the classic IBM playbook.
- pjmlp 3y ago

datadeft 3y ago

Fuchsia to be added to the dead Google projects list. 3..2..1

slowhadoken 3y ago

Is google waiting to get purchased by Microsoft or something? I don’t understand what they’re turning into at this point.

Exoristos 3y ago
My guess is that you just thought ahead further than anybody in their executive team has in quite a while.
- slowhadoken 3y ago
  I've been told I'm too smart for my own good. I mean based on whatever people think good is these days.
gryn 3y ago
it's turning into your regular company run by bean counters, nothing surprising a lot of companies become like this with time.
- slowhadoken 3y ago
  Yeah, it's really sad. I feel like Elon Musk is fighting that downward trajectory towards mediocrity but he's punished daily for it so it must be hard to resists. I guess when you get as big as Google you get tangled in economic and governmental obligations. It's a real Letterman-Chappelle situation.
rodgerd 3y ago
They have a laundry list of anti-trust investigations lined up against Apple for "anything Apple do better than Google" so it appears that they will be resting on their browser, search, video, and mapping monopolies which are funded by their ad duopoly, and using the US government to force competitors to hand their products over to Google.
- slowhadoken 3y ago
  I really don't know how business works at that high of a level. I'm not sure how much of it is for show and make believe at a federal level and how much of it is an actual dirty fight. I've never found a coherent book on the subject.

ramesh31 3y ago

Pathetic. The last remaining gasp of any chance at anything innovative ever coming from Google again, over a decade of work, being tossed out to juice some quarterly numbers.

skinkestek 3y ago
Thankfully Google has become lame. And this is coming from someone who cheered for Google until I guess 2012, then gave them up but defended them until maybe 2017 - 2019 somewhere and now just hope they are never recovers. Let them go the way of IBM: continue to exist without threatening general purpose computing.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

It's been clear for a while that Google was de-emphasizing the importance of Fuchsia. Chrome dropping support kind of rules it out as a viable OS for any consumer device. Next up is probably a proper shutdown of the team. Aside from some Nest thingies, did anything else ever launch with Fuchsia? Does it have any relevance for any server side stuff that Google does internally? My guess is that what happened is that they failed to get OEMs enthusiastic about Fuchsia. At least I assume the likes of Samsung would not be super excited about giving away control of even more of their stack to Google. And I don't think it's a recent thing either; this likely became pretty clear years ago and the project has been slowly dying ever since.

klooney 3y ago
Yeah- the license and single-source-of-developers mean that Fuchsia has looked like a Trojan horse to competitors.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Which it probably would have been, Google regrets giving so much control to OEMs with android and they won't do that again with new development. They locked down wear os a lot more too. But with android it's hard to take back what they've given already. Meaning the OEMs will not be as happy to take fuchsia on board. Not for its technical merits but for the new start under new rules it will imply. The only way for Google to force them would be to discontinue Android which would be very risky. People could fork it, it would put their marketshare at risk of competitors and it would take years to get the app gap with ios closed again as they'd be starting from zero. As a privacy-conscious user I'd worry more about whether the licence permits something like lineage to exist based on fuchsia. I'm sure it's more secure but more under the control of Google too who I'd put into the adversary camp. I wouldn't use it until it was first cleaned of spyware by projects like graphene or lineage. I'm not sure if the license permits this.

spankalee 3y ago

This is pretty disappointing, but the writing was already on the wall for any desktop-ish version of Fuchsia. I do hope it somehow still replaces the Android core someday, maybe just running the Android Chrome via Starnix. It's a bummer because Fuchsia takes everything we've learned from automatic software updates, devices that run untrusted and semi-trusted code, proprietary drivers in a OSS kernel, devices whose manufactures aren't compelled to update them, the unsuitability of the user-based security model, containers, and more and applied it to a new kernel and OS. Fuchsia is more or less exactly the kind of trust-nothing OS architecture I want to run as an end user and as a developer who has to run a lot of random 3rd-party code locally.

pjmlp 3y ago

By now it is clear that Fuchsia will eventually follow Brillo and Android Things footsteps. It is a shame, Fuchsia has a lot of cool ideas, I guess by having Binder, Android IPC for Treble drivers with a microkernel like approach, and Rust integration, kind of keeps some of Fuchsia's ideas on Android, leaving little else for Fuchsia, other than replacing the Linux kernel.

belval 3y ago

I feel like the AI debacle with Google having no good answer to ChatGPT was only the tip of the iceberg and it's becoming clear that the company does not have a good leadership structure in place. Some blame Sundar, personally I have no idea if it's true but it's sad to see a company that seemed so bleeding edge slowly decay like that.

huytersd 3y ago
Don’t they? Based on their benchmarks Gemini Ultra is supposed to be better than chatGPT. I guess we’ll wait and see when it comes out this year.
- belval 3y ago
  It's supposed to be, but GPT-4 was released almost a full year ago now.
- acdha 3y ago
  We’ll see how it compares but also a single technical success does not make a successful business, and it doesn’t replace a strategy. OpenAI has a ton of interest right now but is also losing a lot of money annually, and a lot of AI products are hitting pain points around reliability and security which are going to require significant advances to overcome. Google appears to be flailing around trying to find something which will work, and given how much of this technology they invented that is really a strong argument for better management.

dmazzoni 3y ago

I worked at Google (on the Chrome team) at the time Fuchsia was started and for many years after that. The team had some of Google's most brilliant engineers working on it. Technically, they had some really impressive stuff. However, I don't think anyone was ever able to articulate to me its path to success. In other words - let's say you build an amazing, powerful new operating system. How do you actually get anyone to adopt it? What frustrated me is that there wasn't even an answer for Android or Chrome OS. Why build a new operating system that wouldn't even be relevant or useful for those, the two platforms that Google had total 100% control over? If I had been in charge of the world, I would have taken a more pragmatic approach. Chrome OS was the obvious first target - it was built on Linux but it didn't have to be. The operating system really only has a tiny number of native binaries that need to run on it: * Chrome * The Chrome OS GUI (which shares a lot of code with Chrome but is distinct) * The Android VM * A Linux VM If you port those four to run on another operating system, then you're done. You could start shipping Chrome OS devices based on that new OS. I think it also would have been reasonable to have a goal to port Android to run on it, basically replace the Linux kernel. Probably it would have been necessary to add some Linux compatibility layer to enable Linux drivers for some number of years, with the goal of eventually shipping devices that don't require Linux. But the Fuchsia team wanted to build a complete operating system from scratch, including a whole new GUI, a whole new developer SDK, and more. Why??? When they were finally forced to ship something useful, they shipped the Nest Hub, which in my opinion was a big mistake. The Nest Hub based on Fuchsia does absolutely nothing that the previous one didn't do. It basically took a relatively simple, easy product and increased its maintenance burden by 100x while providing no value. If they had chosen Chrome OS instead it could have actually provided some value in terms of performance, security, modularity, and developer APIs. It just seems like such a waste of talent to try to reinvent everything with no plan for adoption, rather than building more incrementally and actually shipping.

spankalee 3y ago
I think they may have thought that if they built something great that "management" would make the other teams adopt Fuchsia at the core somehow. Of course other teams just develop a defensive stance and guard against that politically and, as Android has done, by adopting their ideas. The later is good actually, since incremental changes are so more likely to land and stick.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

The article keeps talking about the Chrome Browser on Fuschia being discontinued & the end of Workstation. > At first, the shift from workstation to workbench seems like a simple name change, but the subsequent discontinuation of Chrome for Fuchsia all but confirms that Google does not intend to release a desktop/mobile device directly powered by Fuchsia in the foreseeable future. But then it turns around and says what seems to be: oh, but the web view will still be maintained! > Importantly, this move has no implications for the Nest Hub lineup, which will continue to receive updates and support web-based features as normal. Giving up on Chrome as an app, a full browser with user experience - that's one thing. But if the web engine is still alive & maintained, that feels like a fairly reversible choice. It's hard to imagine Fuschia persisting without a web engine, but that doesn't seem like what the pile of inferences in this article is saying!