Chrome: speed is the top priority

Google Chrome OS is a controversial project. Some people think that its concept is too advanced, while others think that it cannot succeed at all. It is based on a Linux system, but has abandoned thousands of open-source software. It sticks to the "browser as the operating system" and focuses on network applications. In addition, to run Chrome OS smoothly, you must use dedicated hardware chromebook or chromebox, which also limits its development. Therefore, it is hard to fall in love with it, whether it is a profitable hardware vendor or an open-source enthusiast.

However, with the continuous promotion of Google, Chrome OS has made some good progress and received support from more vendors, including Lenovo and HP. In particular, the emergence of a series of low-price chromebooks began to attract the attention of some consumers. According to some recent reports, chromebook has captured more than 2000 schools, PC vendor Acer also said C7 chromebook is selling well in the United States. Of course, this does not prove that the prospects of Chrome OS will be bright immediately. It relies heavily on networks and does not meet user habits. It is a major problem that needs to be overcome in development. So why is Chrome OS designed like this? Recently, Google
Former engineer Jeff Nelson published an article explaining this issue from the origin of Chrome OS and some interesting things about the birth of Chrome OS.

Jeff Nelson said that he completed a Linux-based system in July 2006 with the code "Google OS" based on Firefox. At that time, Google had not developed its own browser or the product name chrome. He made a patent for the new system called "cross-device, network-based operating system" and was approved in August 7, 2012. At that time, he had been away from the company for a long time. The initial response from the management to the system was very cold.

In 2007, Google started testing Chrome internally, and the system had a chrome-based version.

Chrome OS was originally positioned not as the "second device" for browsing the Web page, but as a full-featured Linux release. In fact, Jeff used chromebook as the main development machine for a year. His main purpose of developing chromebook is not to write an operating system that can only run network applications, but to create a super fast operating system.

Jeff Nelson wrote a new system because he was very dissatisfied with the speed of Windows and Linux. His primary job at that time was to write network applications for Google, so it was often a slow process to restart the browser. Therefore, he came up with an idea: putting the entire operating system in the memory will break through the biggest bottleneck in the operating system performance: file I/O ).

When discussing this idea, almost everyone mentioned the data loss issue. Jeff said this is not a problem. Many tasks are completed through network applications, and data can be backed up to a network disk or local hard disk. Therefore, in addition to startup and backup, the operating system does not need to read the hard disk at all.

Running an operating system with resident memory also brings challenges. Because the memory space is small, any redundant applications should be avoided. "Find a network application that can replace any function on the desktop application, it becomes the primary issue. This seeds network applications for chromium desktops, although they were originally written in HTML and run on Firefox ."

Jeff Nelson believes that this is a basic change to the existing architecture of modern operating systems, and its benefits are far greater than the loss, because our lives are already interconnected and online, we need to store less data and do not need to rely on local hard disks.