Google’s Chrome OS team is rethinking the Chrome OS windowing approach and is developing a multi-window interface for Chrome OS as well as hardware acceleration to support new visual effects and pixel shaders. There is also a note about Chrome OS going into a cross-platform direction.
The Chrome OS UI team has recently laid out plans for the likely future of the operating system. Most of the plans appear to be driven by the growing “desire” to run the operating system not only on netbooks, but on “larger format devices.” The three key aspects of the development approach appear to be the integration of hardware acceleration, cross-platform support including a consolidation of Chrome UIs, as well as multi-window support for the UI.
A note posted on the Chromium Projects site states that the effects the UI team is designing for windows will require hardware accelerated compositing and other visual effects such as pixel shaders. The future graphics backend of Chrome OS will not only be based on XLib, a C-based X Windows System protocol client library, but also on OpenGL, Direct3D – and Win32. Google said that is wants to “consolidate” the Chrome UI on Windows and Chrome OS to broaden the test community.
Chrome OS Windowing Design Proposal (c) Google
Google is also mentioning windowing support for multiple platforms, including Windows (D3D for Windows), Linux (GL for Linux) as well as Mac OS, supported by the combination of the backends. From the document: “In conjunction with the design and development of this API, and some back ends, we would build a cross-platform windowing component that implements the higher level desktop window management capabilities prescribed in the UX mocks.”
The team has apparently already begun “prototyping some of the UX mocks on the Mac “(since the framework present there allows for hardware accelerated effects) so the UI team can begin refining the design as the infrastructure is built on Windows and Linux.”
Alternatively, Google briefly considered to approach its ideas by building the interfaces entirely in HTML. It seems that this strategy has been dropped. According to the document: “While this is a cool idea, the performance characteristics and API-completeness of the web platform for a task as large as this has yet to be proven. We would also have to rewrite most of our front-end code in JavaScript to keep the programming model sane. We should keep this kind of objective in mind as we work with the web platform community to improve its capabilities, but not rely on it for our first implementation.”
Chrome OS is currently limited to one window, but Google believes that multiple open windows could be beneficial especial on larger screen devices. This seems to play well into the plan to enable Chrome Windows that would allow users to be signed on to different Google accounts at the same time, as long as the user names apply to different browser windows.
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