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It's not clutching at straws at all - they very clearly are diverging from the spec everyone else is using, moving to not prefixing, and shipping as on by defau

It's not clutching at straws at all - they very clearly are diverging from the spec everyone else is using, moving to not prefixing, and shipping as on by default. This might as well be in secret, since the Chrome group are developing the habit of dictating specs by pushing implementations out regardless of the community, and thus is no better than the OHA, who at least talk amongst themselves. There are also proprietary Android libraries that exist for different manufacturers, but you're probably insane if you rely on them. I used to work doing games on Android across all varieties of it, and the differences are nothing like as big as people that haven't looked properly seem to think. In fact for many titles without push or in app billing it was simply a question of testing, and these things ran perfectly, or no worse than any other issue you might have with a device on the Play Store. It is most definitely less than the difference between different web browsers, and far better defined. Do this a few times and it can be abstracted away (to the point of portability to iOS abstracted). Let's say I'm an OEM without an existing contract with Google. I could either build a Chromium device or an Android one, and shove some other app store on it. Unsurprisingly many are doing the latter, and they're in the wild, but has anyone seen a Chromium device actually out there? Given how many Chromebooks are selling you'd think maybe one enterprising Chinese OEM would do it, but they seem far keener on Android. I wonder why. You are greatly overestimating how hard it is to implement services on the device. The only hard part of implementing a store and in app billing, for example, is the server. The clients practically write themselves by comparison. Given that the entire Chinese Android market exists without Google's cloud services it's clearly nothing like as big a deal as you and Google wish it were.

cromwellian 13y ago
Apples to Oranges. You're asking why there aren't as many ChromeBook vendors as there are Android vendors? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that consumers are buying less traditional computers and buying more phones and tablets. No one is wishing anything is a big deal. I am not attacking Android or the bogus Ars Technica articles which keep pushing the line that AOSP isn't open. I'm criticizing this weird claim that ChromeOS is more of a walled garden, which it most decidedly is not. Chromium is "more" open source than Android because it is developed continuously in the open, there's no "code bomb" that publishes the entire Next version once a year. Secondly, the surface area of Chrome-specific APIs or services are tiny and insignificant compared to native devices. Those two features limit platform lockin and increase portability. The Chrome Web Store/Chrome Apps are simply a red herring. The vast vast majority of ChromeOS "apps" are links to hosted sites, the majority of which work on any browser. That's been the major problem getting people to pay for stuff in the CWS as you can cut/paste the URL and avoid the store entirely for many apps. Leaving aside Chromium, many people have taken WebKit and made desktops based on it. WebOS, the new SteamBox uses a frontend built with WebKit, the PlayStation UI has various parts built with a browser. There was also Jolicloud. It is not hard to take a Linux distribution and slap a browser on it as the desktop launcher. Sorry, it's just not. Whether people are interested in doing that and think it is something they could sell for a profit is a different story that has nothing to do with the technical difficulty of doing it.
- fidotron 13y ago
  As I pointed out, Blink devs are now code-bombing. Yes they tell you about it in advance, but you're damned if you want any input on what's in it if you don't agree with them. I fail to see how this is any better.

cromwellian 13y ago

Apples to Oranges. You're asking why there aren't as many ChromeBook vendors as there are Android vendors? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that consumers are buying less traditional computers and buying more phones and tablets. No one is wishing anything is a big deal. I am not attacking Android or the bogus Ars Technica articles which keep pushing the line that AOSP isn't open. I'm criticizing this weird claim that ChromeOS is more of a walled garden, which it most decidedly is not. Chromium is "more" open source than Android because it is developed continuously in the open, there's no "code bomb" that publishes the entire Next version once a year. Secondly, the surface area of Chrome-specific APIs or services are tiny and insignificant compared to native devices. Those two features limit platform lockin and increase portability. The Chrome Web Store/Chrome Apps are simply a red herring. The vast vast majority of ChromeOS "apps" are links to hosted sites, the majority of which work on any browser. That's been the major problem getting people to pay for stuff in the CWS as you can cut/paste the URL and avoid the store entirely for many apps. Leaving aside Chromium, many people have taken WebKit and made desktops based on it. WebOS, the new SteamBox uses a frontend built with WebKit, the PlayStation UI has various parts built with a browser. There was also Jolicloud. It is not hard to take a Linux distribution and slap a browser on it as the desktop launcher. Sorry, it's just not. Whether people are interested in doing that and think it is something they could sell for a profit is a different story that has nothing to do with the technical difficulty of doing it.

fidotron 13y ago
As I pointed out, Blink devs are now code-bombing. Yes they tell you about it in advance, but you're damned if you want any input on what's in it if you don't agree with them. I fail to see how this is any better.