Tom Mollerus' Weblog

In today's day-two keynote speech at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai announced that "Chromebooks" were coming to market from Samsung and Acer. Chromebooks, aren't laptops or even netbooks; instead, they're better defined as web clients running in a laptop-like form factor. Given that a majority of my time is spent on the web and that a significant portion of my applications are web-based, I can believe that an OS that consists of only a browser can be a success. After all, with an 8-second boot time, an 8-hour battery, and less installed software to grow corrupt as it ages, Chromebooks are going to be very appealing to users who currently use slow, old laptops which take a while to boot.

But here's one extremely interesting aspect of the Chromebook specs as listed on the feature pages for the Samsung and Acer models: there's no specification of hard drive size. It's internal storage isn't even mentioned.

What an incredible development in computing. If you're going to access all of your applications from the web, you may as well keep all of your files there, too. You'd only have to upload them anyway. Plus, it makes the whole "portable computing" concept a lot more practical. On the Chromebook platform, any user can conceivably use any Chromebook to do their work. Just log in (with your Google account, of course), and no matter whose Chromebook you're on, you have access to your accounts, apps, settings, and files. You couldn't do that if the Chromebook had local versions of your files.

So do Chromebooks need a hard drive? I'm sure they need some manner of long-term storage, but they're right that it's becoming pointless to list it as a spec.

I'll be at Google I/O next week; if you're going to be there, drop me a line so we can meet up!

If you aren't already planning to attend I/O but you're interested in finding out more about HTML5 and Google technologies, I highly recommend that you participate in Google I/O Extended, where you can watch the keynote presentation and other major sessions via live video. It's well worth watching even if you don't use Google services or technologies; you'll learn more about the latest developments in general web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, web fonts, and web video.

While Eric Meyer was talking humorously about the "dark side" of CSS, he mentioned a really interesting fact: most modern browsers will "lie" to you when reporting properties of visited links via JavaScript. For instance, if your current stylesheet specifies that unvisited links are blue and visited links are purple, and your code try to access the color property of a link that's been visited, it won't return the value for purple; instead, it will report that the link's color is... blue. The same will happen for any property that you can access for a visited link: background image, background color, font face, size, etc. So why did browser makers do this?

Eric's example of why browser makers would do this was that in authoritarian countries which restrict and monitor Internet access, a government might be interested in trying to monitor which URLs people visit. If that government can inject a script into each page requested from their country, or if they can control the browser or operating system (let's think China), then they have one more method of tracking which URLs a particular user has visited. It doesn't sound efficient, but it's possible.

I think I have a more accurate guess as to why this has been done: XSRF, or cross-site request forgery. This was an exploit that was discovered a couple of years ago, and it works by a script causing your browser to request a URL, perhaps to a site that you're already logged in to, for someone else's benefit. For instance, if a malicious script created a link on a page you were browsing, and could detect that you had visited it, it could then initiate a JavaScript event that caused your browser to make a friend request on Facebook, or purchase something on eBay, or share your email address book on GMail, or reset your password on NYTimes.com to something the script owner knows about.

This first day of the conference is really making clear the difference between mediocre speakers and good ones. Whether anyone is a good speaker doesn't depend a bit on their intelligence or even their job expertise. Great speakers are entertaining; they tell a story, perhaps humorously; they keep your interest because they're good storytellers. Mediocre speakers just tell you about their topic, and only about their topic, in plain fashion.