4 ms·

fwiw, I don't think there is currently anything preventing you from accessing the Chrome Web Store from Chromium, without any kind of API key or proprietary ext

by comex 13y ago

fwiw, I don't think there is currently anything preventing you from accessing the Chrome Web Store from Chromium, without any kind of API key or proprietary extension. Of course that could theoretically change if someone started commercially distributing a forked Chromium OS, but we shouldn't blame Google for something it hasn't done.

fidotron 13y ago
Irrelevant, since your users would still need a Google account to use that store, and developers would still need to publish through it. The whole problem is duplicating that store.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  For Chromium, developers do not need to publish apps through the Chrome Store, nor do you need a Google account to use such apps. Chrome has the same side-loading capability of Android allowing install from unknown sources. There are apps that Google refuses from the Web Store that are distributed this way. I don't think you're going to get many people to believe that apps which target a platform that is mostly based on a spec controlled by a consortium, and for the most part, are cross-platform, are somehow more locked down and proprietary than a native apps platform. This is pretty much the first time I've seen anyone on HN try to argue that web apps, even chromium apps, are harder to port, and more of a walled garden than Android. It's a difficult to pull off argument, and I don't think it works.
  - fidotron 13y ago
    Except Chrome increasingly doesn't implement the standard. For example, Adobe's recent CSS stuff isn't in, and instead an early version of the shadow DOM stuff which even Mozilla doesn't agree with is going in, on top of all the Chrome app API itself. As I keep pointing out, you can literally implement something that presents the user a button and on pressing it downloads an apk, installs the package and runs the content in about 10 minutes. Can you do that with crx files in Chrome or Chromium without it triggering a nasty popup? Can your locally installed app then provide services to this other app we just downloaded without needing an intermediary server? If not, it's not as open as Android is.
    - cromwellian 13y ago
      This is really a red herring grasping for straws. All browsers have proprietary extensions and have differences from the spec. HTML5 for the most part works because people use what's portable. Html5test.com wouldn't need to exist if this weren't true. The fact of the matter is, Web apps are more portable than Android apps, period. Take a random sample of the Chrome Web Store apps, how many of them do you think are tightly bound to be Chrome proprietary API only and won't run elsewhere? How many of them won't install or run on a forked Chromium? Now go take a random sample of the Play store. And test those apps on say, a Chinese AOSP fork or Amazon's fork. How many of them will run without breaking? In no way can you compare GMS dependencies to a handful of Chrome-only APIs that barely any web developers use. And when we talk about open-ness, we're talking about open source and how open the project is developed. Web standards have working groups to agree upon a spec. For the most part, the majority of new CSS or Javascript features are decided on at the W3C and TC39. That is a far cry different than the way say, future versions of Android are developed in secret. I understand some of the restrictions on why Android is developed like that but to compare it to the web or iOS is a false equivalence. The fact that Web apps can't do the kinds of things you're talking about with respect to inter-app services has nothing to do with openness and more to do with the sandbox that the web puts apps into. That said, locally installed apps can provide services to other apps through multiple techniques: * Background pages (invisible HTML pages running in the background) * Shared Web Workers (spawned process that lives at a known address) * Custom Protocol Handler * Service Workers (intercept HTTP requests for resources) * Chrome Extension content page * WebRTC or local web server * Web Intents/Web Activities (got shelved by Google and Mozilla) From your perspective, you're talking about what's presented to the developer. But this discussion is about Independent Hardware Vendors. What does it take for someone to build their own usable ChromeOS device vs build a modern smartphone starting with only open source. For ChromeOS, you get very very far with the existing open source and most apps will run unchanged. For Android, if you start only from AOSP, any apps dependent on the Google cloud will be broke, and the question is, how easy is it to shim those services out and replace them, and it is far more work. This is not a bash on AOSP or Android. It's just a retort to the ridiculous idea that somehow web apps on ChromeOS are more locked in than Android.
      - 13y ago
- comex 13y ago
  The discussion originated in a claim that "anyone who wants to build a Web-browser based netbook could do so, they just couldn't call it ChromeBook". If the Web Store remains freely accessible, then they could do that without needing to duplicate it. edit: i.e. the Web Store is playing the same role as any other website. You wouldn't criticize Chrome OS for the difficulty of making an alternative to Facebook for your fork.

by comex 13y ago

fidotron 13y ago

Irrelevant, since your users would still need a Google account to use that store, and developers would still need to publish through it. The whole problem is duplicating that store.

cromwellian 13y ago
For Chromium, developers do not need to publish apps through the Chrome Store, nor do you need a Google account to use such apps. Chrome has the same side-loading capability of Android allowing install from unknown sources. There are apps that Google refuses from the Web Store that are distributed this way. I don't think you're going to get many people to believe that apps which target a platform that is mostly based on a spec controlled by a consortium, and for the most part, are cross-platform, are somehow more locked down and proprietary than a native apps platform. This is pretty much the first time I've seen anyone on HN try to argue that web apps, even chromium apps, are harder to port, and more of a walled garden than Android. It's a difficult to pull off argument, and I don't think it works.
- fidotron 13y ago
  Except Chrome increasingly doesn't implement the standard. For example, Adobe's recent CSS stuff isn't in, and instead an early version of the shadow DOM stuff which even Mozilla doesn't agree with is going in, on top of all the Chrome app API itself. As I keep pointing out, you can literally implement something that presents the user a button and on pressing it downloads an apk, installs the package and runs the content in about 10 minutes. Can you do that with crx files in Chrome or Chromium without it triggering a nasty popup? Can your locally installed app then provide services to this other app we just downloaded without needing an intermediary server? If not, it's not as open as Android is.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    This is really a red herring grasping for straws. All browsers have proprietary extensions and have differences from the spec. HTML5 for the most part works because people use what's portable. Html5test.com wouldn't need to exist if this weren't true. The fact of the matter is, Web apps are more portable than Android apps, period. Take a random sample of the Chrome Web Store apps, how many of them do you think are tightly bound to be Chrome proprietary API only and won't run elsewhere? How many of them won't install or run on a forked Chromium? Now go take a random sample of the Play store. And test those apps on say, a Chinese AOSP fork or Amazon's fork. How many of them will run without breaking? In no way can you compare GMS dependencies to a handful of Chrome-only APIs that barely any web developers use. And when we talk about open-ness, we're talking about open source and how open the project is developed. Web standards have working groups to agree upon a spec. For the most part, the majority of new CSS or Javascript features are decided on at the W3C and TC39. That is a far cry different than the way say, future versions of Android are developed in secret. I understand some of the restrictions on why Android is developed like that but to compare it to the web or iOS is a false equivalence. The fact that Web apps can't do the kinds of things you're talking about with respect to inter-app services has nothing to do with openness and more to do with the sandbox that the web puts apps into. That said, locally installed apps can provide services to other apps through multiple techniques: * Background pages (invisible HTML pages running in the background) * Shared Web Workers (spawned process that lives at a known address) * Custom Protocol Handler * Service Workers (intercept HTTP requests for resources) * Chrome Extension content page * WebRTC or local web server * Web Intents/Web Activities (got shelved by Google and Mozilla) From your perspective, you're talking about what's presented to the developer. But this discussion is about Independent Hardware Vendors. What does it take for someone to build their own usable ChromeOS device vs build a modern smartphone starting with only open source. For ChromeOS, you get very very far with the existing open source and most apps will run unchanged. For Android, if you start only from AOSP, any apps dependent on the Google cloud will be broke, and the question is, how easy is it to shim those services out and replace them, and it is far more work. This is not a bash on AOSP or Android. It's just a retort to the ridiculous idea that somehow web apps on ChromeOS are more locked in than Android.
    - 13y ago
comex 13y ago
The discussion originated in a claim that "anyone who wants to build a Web-browser based netbook could do so, they just couldn't call it ChromeBook". If the Web Store remains freely accessible, then they could do that without needing to duplicate it. edit: i.e. the Web Store is playing the same role as any other website. You wouldn't criticize Chrome OS for the difficulty of making an alternative to Facebook for your fork.