Google define requisitos para PCs com sistema Chrome

Era para ser uma semana de atenções voltadas exclusivamente à Microsoft, com o lançamento do sistema de computação em nuvem Azure e a disponibilidade da versão de teste do Office 2010, cujo lançamento está previsto para o primeiro semestre do ano que vem. Mas, ontem, o Google decidiu atrair parte dos holofotes.

Confirmando comentários que desde a semana passada circulavam no mercado, a empresa convidou a imprensa para falar sobre seu sistema operacional Chrome OS. A data de lançamento ainda não foi determinada, mas a companhia deu detalhes sobre o ponto atual de desenvolvimento do software, anunciado em julho. Segundo Sundar Pichai, vice-presidente de produto Chrome no Google, os primeiros dispositivos com o sistema instalado começarão a chegar ao mercado nos próximos 12 meses, a tempo das compras de Natal de 2010. "Dá muito trabalho criar um sistema operacional, ainda mais no prazo de um ano, como queremos", disse Pichai, em videoconferência.

De acordo com o executivo, as máquinas terão características semelhantes às dos netbooks - os notebooks simplificados e de tamanho reduzido, mas com telas e teclados ligeiramente maiores que os vendidos atualmente. O Google também está pedindo que os fabricantes de PCs coloquem em suas máquinas componentes de fornecedores pré-selecionados. "Estamos fazendo requisitos específicos aos fabricantes para permitir que o software entenda o equipamento perfeitamente [fazendo com que o sistema tenha o desempenho esperado]", afirmou Pichai.

Entre os pedidos está o uso de discos de estado sólido (SSDs) no lugar dos discos rígidos (HDs) convencionais. Os SSDs são montados com chips de memória flash - a mesma dos pen drives, tocadores de música e de alguns notebooks, como o MacBook Air, da Apple -, e oferecem maior velocidade no acesso às informações armazenadas e menor consumo de energia. Fabricantes como Hewlett-Packard (HP), Acer e Asus já mostraram interesse pelo Chrome OS.

O Chrome OS obedece às regras do chamado código aberto, que permite a qualquer desenvolvedor alterar o sistema, compartilhando suas criações via internet. A estratégia do Google ao usar esse modelo, em que não há cobrança de licença de uso do software, é fazer com que os fabricantes de PCs cobrem menos por suas máquinas, aumentando as vendas. O Google espera que isso aumente o acesso dos usuários à web, de onde a companhia retira a maior parte de sua receita, com base na publicidade on-line.

Por conta do rigor em torno dos componentes necessários, o Chrome OS não poderá ser baixado da internet e instalado em máquinas antigas.

O sistema operacional do Google está sendo construído em torno do programa de navegação Chrome, lançado há pouco mais de um ano e que, segundo Pichai, já é usado por 40 milhões de pessoas. Sua aparência é exatamente igual à de seu irmão mais velho, com os incrementos de desempenho e segurança que o Google acredita ser necessários para fazer do sistema operacional uma alternativa ao Windows, da Microsoft, e aos demais sistemas, como o Linux. "Estamos trabalhando em três pontos principais: velocidade, simplicidade e segurança", disse Pichai.

Com o Chrome OS, o usuário não terá que instalar nada no computador. Todas as informações e programas serão acessados pela internet, dentro do conceito de computação em nuvem. Na demonstração do sistema, Pichai abriu uma planilha eletrônica usando a versão on-line do Excel, acessado pelo site Office Live, da Microsoft. "Qualquer aplicação criada para a internet é uma aplicação criada para o Chrome OS", afirmou o executivo.

Arquivos como músicas e vídeos poderão ser armazenados na máquina para uso em momentos sem conexão à rede. "Mas a expectativa é de que os aparelhos estejam sempre conectados", disse Pichai. Na avaliação do executivo, entretanto, os computadores com Chrome OS serão a segunda máquina para muitos consumidores, um equipamento com o qual eles passam boa parte do tempo, mas sem fins profissionais. "Se você for um advogado, que edita muitos contratos, não será a máquina para você", disse.

Fonte: Valor Online

After 5 Years on Web, Firefox Preps for Next Round

From left to right, Mozilla’s director of mobile Stuart Parmenter, director of Firefox development Mike Beltzner, manager of Firefox’s front-end–features team Johnathan Nightingale and Firefox principal engineer Vladimir Vukićević. The foursome sits below a quilt made by Mozilla Foundation chairwoman Mitchell Baker. Photo: Michael Calore.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Vladimir Vukićević was working at the Mozilla office when Firefox was first released into the wild.
“All of our servers melted instantly,” Vukićević says. “We spent an hour trying to get the downloads back up.”
Indeed, the anticipation around the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004 — five years ago Monday — was electric.
Mozilla had already produced its own eponymous browser based on open source code in 2002, but it was largely considered a failure. Firefox was the organization’s great re-do, and its second attempt to unseat its biggest nemesis, Microsoft Internet Explorer.
A half-decade later, Firefox is no longer a scrappy upstart but a dominant player. Old rival IE still commands around 60 percent of the market share, but close to a quarter of the web now uses Firefox — a formidable number which speaks to its success as an open source project. At a time when nobody wanted to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, thousands of disparate programmers rose to the challenge, landing Firefox on the short list of other open source triumphs like Wikipedia, Ubuntu Linux, WordPress and the web itself.
Successes aside, Firefox is now at a tipping point.
Five years ago, it was all about beating Microsoft. Left unchecked, the company was free to dictate what shape the web would take. Firefox’s popularity created a new market for web standards and forced Redmond to take open-web technologies seriously.
Now, Firefox faces a bigger struggle. It needs to continue to innovate and remain relevant in an ever-changing, and ever-more-competitive, landscape.
“When it was just us and Microsoft, the story was very simple — it was the little guy versus the giant,” says Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner, who oversees Firefox’s development. “Now you’ve got heavy hitters like Microsoft, Google and Apple all competing, which make the stories a lot more interesting.”
The web itself has changed significantly in the last five years, as well. It’s no longer just a network of connected documents, but a full-fledged platform filled with real applications that run in the browser and share data with one another.
“It’s hard to cast your mind back and think about what the internet was like in 2004,” says Beltzner. “Five years ago, there was no Google Maps. Gmail was very new. All these things — applications that are now parts of the web that we would never think couldn’t be there — were just not there. Most of the reason was that browsers weren’t yet being designed with all of these advanced capabilities.”
Firefox was one of the first browsers built for this new web filled with applications. As a result, it gained favor with developers and users. But it also encouraged fiercer competition.
“It’s not just that the platform has changed, there’s a whole ecosystem of great browsers now,” says Mozilla’s Johnathan Nightingale, manager of the Firefox front-end features team.
We’re in the middle of the second great browser renaissance, and Firefox is no longer the sole leader. Feature-wise, Apple’s Safari browser is neck and neck with Firefox. Internet Explorer is catching up quickly. Google released its Chrome browser in September 2008. Much like Firefox, it arrived with a huge fanfare and quickly proved to be the web’s new golden child — simpler, faster, better than everyone else.
Along with Chrome, Google launched a public relations campaign highlighting the benefits of using its browser to run web applications like Gmail and Google Docs. Google’s PR push underscored the importance of things like browser performance and speed among developers and the general public alike.
In short, Google brought sexy back to the browser.
“One of the things Chrome did is make the way everybody communicates about browser development more energetic and public,” Vukićević says. “Before Chrome, we were doing a lot of really interesting things, but we were having a hard time communicating that.”
Nightingale agrees that since then, Mozilla has gotten a lot better at building up excitement around new features in Firefox. The company has launched a Hacks blog that shows demos of all the latest technologies, and it posts videos — sometimes as many as three or four per week — showcasing the innovations coming out of its experimental Labs office.
“Compared to the world that just had IE6 in it, we’re able to generate excitement about what we offer much more clearly,” Nightingale says.
In response to the increased interest in new technologies, Mozilla has stepped up its release schedule, too. The wait between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 was close to two years — an eon in web time.
“When Firefox 3 neared completion, people were tremendously Angsty that it was such a superior experience to Firefox 2, yet we hadn’t shipped it yet,” Nightingale says. “That’s what stung the most. There were all these great features, and we weren’t ready to give it to people yet. We had to change that.”
Mozilla took another year to push out Firefox version 3.5, which arrived in June. But now, the team is committed to delivering a new release every six months. Firefox 3.6 is due by the end of 2009.
“We can’t have another two years where we’re sitting on awesome stuff that the rest of the world doesn’t get to have,” Nightingale says.
Another cause for Angst around the release of Firefox 3 was its abundance of features, which some users saw as unnecessary bloat. Version 3 fixed many of the stability and performance problems of its predecessor, but Firefox’s transformation from 2004’s svelte browser to today’s full-bodied machine was only made more obvious by Chrome’s debut as a bare-bones speed demon.
Still, Chrome’s arrival has put increased support for open web technologies on everyone’s road map. The next versions of Firefox will continue down that path.
At the top of the list for Firefox’s future is better support for HTML5, the set of technologies — already heavily supported by Firefox, Chrome and Safari (but not IE) — that define how web pages are built and how web applications function. Also, Mozilla has thrown its weight behind two open source technologies, the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and the Ogg Theora video format. Both enable new methods for displaying fonts on web pages and for playing videos in the browser which don’t rely on proprietary technologies like Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash and AIR.
This commitment to tools that let developers build better web experiences without using plug-ins was one of the project’s core principles when it was first launched.
According to Nightingale, openness will continue to play a key role in shaping the browser’s future.
“We always ask, ‘What is it that people on the open web can’t do right now? What’s pushing them towards things like Adobe AIR and Silverlight, or other technologies that are single-vendor silos?”
When a developer loses the ability to view a web page’s source code (something you can’t easily do in Flash) they can’t see how web applications and complex interactions function. And, he says, that stymies further experimentation.
“The web is going to be an awesome place to innovate in five years, because we’re going to chase down every awesome development in the proprietary world and make sure it happens on the open web as well. If we fail, then we’ll end up in a place that’s less recognizable than the web today, a web filled with a bunch of internet-delivered Flash executables.”
See Also:
Firefox 1.0 Makes Flashy Debut
More Firefox Bloat? Say It Ain’t So, Mozilla
Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5
How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web
Fennec Fits Everything You Love About Firefox Into Your Pocket

Fonte: WebMonkey