We Didn't Need Google's Schmidt To Tell Us Android and Chrome Wouldn't Merge 107
First time accepted submitter Steve Patterson writes "Thankfully, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has announced that 'Android and Chrome will remain separate.' Rumors that the products would be combined emerged last week when leadership of Android and Chrome were consolidated under Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai. Schmidt stated the obvious, but if you are a developer and you took the bait and thought the rumors might be true, you already read enough of Google Chrome or Google Android documentation before Schmidt's clarification and confirmed that consolidating the two products would be, well, stupid."
Tell it to Mozillla (Score:5, Informative)
Tell it to Mozilla. All resources seem to be going to the OS project. Thunderbird lost funding.
Browser (Score:5, Informative)
I think Chrome and Android have already merged. Chrome is the default browser in Android Linux, now.
Oh, perhaps they meant "Chrome OS" Linux?
Re:It's not as crazy as you think... (Score:5, Informative)
I was always confused why chrome wasn't the default preinstalled browser on android. Google developed the same thing twice?
You seem to have forgotten your history here. Chrome and Android launched around the same time. Hell, Chrome on Linux didn't show up until 2010 - that's *AFTER* the Motorola Droid had launched. It's obvious *NOW* that Chrome should run on Android. But 3-4 years ago both Chrome *and* Android were far from proven, and both were focused on establishing themselves first.
Also, how you build a browser on a desktop is very different from how you build one on mobile. And the vast majority of the work is bringing webkit up on a new platform. WebKit by itself doesn't do much - it's basically "just" HTML parsing + DOM management + JavaScript. Graphics, audio, video, etc... is all platform-specific, and when Android was starting out webkit didn't support touch either.
Re:The OS should match the hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Chrome and Android are very different OS.
Chrome is a browser, and Android is an operating system. Linux is a kernel, and it is the basis for both Android, and ChromeOS, a lightweight Linux distribution intended to present an interface to the user only through the Chrome browser.
Chrome is designed to run off the web on lightweight hardware using a keyboard/mouse while Android has a touch interface and runs on essentially mini-computers and needs to be able run offline.
You do not even know what a minicomputer is, so please don't use that word again until you consult a computing dictionary. Android does not run on minicomputers, and it barely runs on microcomputers. It's intended to run on handheld computing platforms, but one day it should be a dandy operating system for microcomputers as well. (Right now, the hardware support is lacking.) It has no problems supporting a mouse and keyboard interface, which has been true since Gingerbread at the latest — which was delivered with the Acer Aspire One AOD250 netbook, which is an example of a microcomputer.
Combining them is going to give you something like Win 8 - neither one nor the other but a giant mess.
Chrome for Android already exists, which permits you to combine Chrome with Android by installing an APK. It is crap compared to the version of Chrome for microcomputers, which is why ChromeOS even exists. Otherwise, it would make absolutely no sense for Google to maintain two Linux-based operating systems (Android and ChromeOS) due to duplication of effort. When and if Chrome for Android reaches feature-parity with Chrome for ChromeOS, then not only will there be no further reason for ChromeOS to exist, but we will also be able to say that Google has "merged" Android and ChromeOS, since the entire interface of ChromeOS is the Chrome browser.
I admit that for there to be no reason for ChromeOS to exist any longer, that Android will have to be able to run on the equivalent of the highest-end Chromebook shipping at the time, but almost regardless of the details that will be a minor implementation hurdle compared to bringing Chrome for Android up to speed.