Google Chrome OS - The most interesting bit

Well Google have gone and announced they’re creating their own operating system. This is big news in itself and is being covered all over the web, but I think the most interesting part of the announcement is where they state;

Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

Google are not going to use X Window System!

They’re going to provide their own windowing system, and they are going to open-source the code. This is huge, X has so many limitations and issues. Tweaks and workarounds like the Direct Rendering Infrastructure to take better advantage of video hardware are being made, but these are all hamstrung by the underlying architecture of X11.

As one of the Apple Quartz developers, Mike Paquette explained about Apple’s decision to develop Quartz rather than use X11;

once Apple added support for all the features it wanted to include into X11, it would not bear much resemblance to X11 nor be compatible with other servers anyway.

With Google providing a new window system, they have the opportunity to design from scratch a modern architecture for a windowing system. To take advantage of modern video hardware, deal with multiple displays, handle displays DPI correctly, font handling at the lowest levels. All without having to take account of a windowing architecture designed in the 80’s where even the lowest power graphics chip of today would have been unimaginable.

With a whole open source operating system based on this being released with at least one large example application (Google Chrome) maybe a real competitor to X Windows will emerge, and adoption by other projects will occur?

I’m looking forward to seeing this happen.