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The Google Chrome comic bookThe Google Chrome comic bookPosted Sep 2, 2008 15:56 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338)Parent article: The Google Chrome comic book
One thing I'll be curious to see is how Google goes about developing this as FOSS -- and in particular, how and whether they end up building a development community outside Google itself. This is by far the largest FOSS codebase I can think of to come out of Google -- otherwise there's what, a few utility libraries for C++ and Python, Gears, ...?
If you look at the Gears mailing list, for example, it's a bunch of messages of the form "[user] has used [internal google tool] to request a code review! please go to [location on google intranet] to see the patch", and there are no commits from outside Google. Which is understandable, given all the comfy development tech that Google engineers have access to, and not really a problem for something like Gears... but one suspects that Chrome is going to have much more interest from the outside. (E.g., Gears still isn't available for Linux x86-64; apparently no-one cares enough to fix it. I doubt the FOSS crowd will let that kind of thing stand for Chrome.)
Interesting times!
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If you mean "largest monolithic piece of code" then yes Posted Sep 2, 2008 17:16 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] There are over 100 different libraries open-sourced by Google (and don't forget about SoC) so and I think they all combined are bigger then Chrome codebase, but yes, it's probably the largest monolithic piece of code ever open-sourced by Google (though Android probably rival that - but it's not open-source... yet).
If you mean "largest monolithic piece of code" then yes Posted Sep 3, 2008 5:11 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
Basically I mean "largest potential development community" -- the vast majority of Google code releases are API demos, little libraries written by 1 or 2 people, etc. You know, the sort of code that doesn't attract much external development whether it came from Google or just got posted on SourceForge. (And SoC is irrelevant, since the whole motivation for how it's put together is that Google didn't want to get into the business of building development communities, they wanted to leverage the existing experts, i.e. FOSS projects.)
Chrome OTOH has both a large and active team inside Google, and is likely to attract a large number of interested developers, so it seems to create a new challenge for them -- can they build a viable community of external contributors, and collaborate effectively with them?
And yeah, Android will be interesting to watch in this regard as well.
(...WTH did Google reimplement nscd? http://code.google.com/p/gnscd)
If you mean "largest monolithic piece of code" then yes Posted Sep 4, 2008 19:28 UTC (Thu) by pphaneuf (subscriber, #23480) [Link] Have you looked at nscd? ;-)
If you mean "largest monolithic piece of code" then yes Posted Sep 4, 2008 23:23 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I've looked at glibc nscd. Neat, fast, efficient, config file format and
means of operation entirely undocumented (who needs network serialization when you can just shared-mmap() sparse files and read directly from the deserialized representation of the service files).
It's enormously more efficient than the Solaris ncsd used to be back in
The Google Chrome comic book Posted Sep 3, 2008 8:12 UTC (Wed) by sean.hunter (guest, #7920) [Link]
Perhaps this is a sign that I am becoming an old giffer, but I hated this comic book presentation. It may well be a great browser and I will certainly try it, but for all the technical innovations claimed, for me this announcement is the apotheosis of everything wrong with google.
For starters, this document is a set of static images. Why, then, does it not load if you have javascript disabled?
The Google Chrome comic book Posted Sep 3, 2008 15:07 UTC (Wed) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link]
You're not missing anything. The whole comic is a smallish essay stretched across 40 pages by drawing a talking head to say each sentence.
The Google Chrome comic book Posted Sep 3, 2008 16:37 UTC (Wed) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link]
My take is that they wanted to give a presentation online, with lots of visual aids, etc. Not a text dump. The 'traditional' way of doing so is to make a powerpoint presentation and dump the slides online, or videorecord some talking head going through a powerpoint. Which are both extremely painful to watch, and don't work well on the web.
I'd say the format they used is about perfect for 'canning' a presentation for online distribution. Sure, they could have edited a presentation into a movie, a la 'An Inconvenient Truth', but you wouldn't be able to print that out, or watch it in most offices without a pair of headphones.
No matter the effectiveness of the medium is though, I doubt there will be much more like this. Most organizations aren't willing to use something so labor-intensive to produce.
The Google Chrome comic book Posted Sep 3, 2008 19:38 UTC (Wed) by ofeeley (subscriber, #36105) [Link] But what's wrong with hooking up the "prev" and "next" link at the bottom of each page to the appropriate page? That way the back button still works and again there's no need for javascript. As it is the presentation is a classic piece of Obtrusive Javascript. What's the point of writing their own goPage() function in javascript when a browser can already handle previous and next? I like the comic, I think it's a great presentation, but I'm baffled as to why they've done the above.
The Google Chrome comic book Posted Sep 3, 2008 23:15 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Quite so. Plus, it's not some generic talking head: it's the Chrome
developers. :)
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