"Chromebooks have in just the past eight months snagged 20 percent to 25 percent of the U.S. market for laptops that cost less than $300..."[1]
I have no idea how many pageviews we get coming from ChromeOS devices, and I suspect it's hard to differentiate from regular Chrome visits on other systems? Anyway, sales trends clearly suggest they are becoming more of a niche to pay attention to.
It might be nice to have an official Wikipedia Chrome app. There are a few in the Web Store now,[2] but they're not great. For Chrome OS users, the main advantages of having an app, even if all it does is redirect to the website, is the ability to add it to your Chrome homescreen and the dock.
This is probably not such a big market that the Foundation would spend any money developing for it, but I think it's probably not hard, and anyway Google building an OS with the Web as its backbone is kind of cool.
1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-10/google-chromebook-under-300-defies-...
Steven
On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:
"Chromebooks have in just the past eight months snagged 20 percent to 25 percent of the U.S. market for laptops that cost less than $300..."[1]
I have no idea how many pageviews we get coming from ChromeOS devices, and I suspect it's hard to differentiate from regular Chrome visits on other systems? Anyway, sales trends clearly suggest they are becoming more of a niche to pay attention to.
It might be nice to have an official Wikipedia Chrome app. There are a few in the Web Store now,[2] but they're not great. For Chrome OS users, the main advantages of having an app, even if all it does is redirect to the website, is the ability to add it to your Chrome homescreen and the dock.
This is probably not such a big market that the Foundation would spend any money developing for it, but I think it's probably not hard, and anyway Google building an OS with the Web as its backbone is kind of cool.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-10/google-chromebook-under-300-defies-...
Whoops. That [2] is supposed to be https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/Wikipedia
On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:
I have no idea how many pageviews we get coming from ChromeOS devices,
and
I suspect it's hard to differentiate from regular Chrome visits on other systems? Anyway, sales trends clearly suggest they are becoming more of a niche to pay attention to.
Actually, ChromeOS's User-Agent string reports the OS distinctly as 'CrOS'... so we should be able to measure it pretty easily compared to other OSes.
It might be nice to have an official Wikipedia Chrome app. There are a
few
in the Web Store now,[2] but they're not great. For Chrome OS users, the main advantages of having an app, even if all it does is redirect to the website, is the ability to add it to your Chrome homescreen and the dock.
If you're going to build an OS around the web, "web apps" should really just be fancy bookmarks. :)
I'd recommend against building any specific 'app' for a web-based OS like this, but if we can have a Chrome Web Store entry that conveniently bookmarks us and that makes us easier to use, well that'd be awesome.
I'd also kind of like to kill our current Firefox OS app and replace it with a pointer to the mobile web site for the same reason; we have more features on the mobile web site than on the current port-of-a-PhoneGap-app Firefox OS app, which isn't getting maintained.
-- brion
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:30 PM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd also kind of like to kill our current Firefox OS app and replace it with a pointer to the mobile web site for the same reason; we have more features on the mobile web site than on the current port-of-a-PhoneGap-app Firefox OS app, which isn't getting maintained.
+1, PhoneGap sucks. Also I think we have an app on the Blackberry store too, which too should be replaced / killed.
-- Yuvi Panda T http://yuvi.in/blog
On 12.07.2013, 20:07 Yuvi wrote:
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:30 PM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd also kind of like to kill our current Firefox OS app and replace it with a pointer to the mobile web site for the same reason; we have more features on the mobile web site than on the current port-of-a-PhoneGap-app Firefox OS app, which isn't getting maintained.
+1, PhoneGap sucks. Also I think we have an app on the Blackberry store too, which too should be replaced / killed.
And a DelphinBrowser app, apparently already bitrotten to death.
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:00 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd recommend against building any specific 'app' for a web-based OS like this, but if we can have a Chrome Web Store entry that conveniently bookmarks us and that makes us easier to use, well that'd be awesome.
You mean you recommend against OS-specific apps, like we have specific apps for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android? ;)
Snark aside: what you proposed is essentially how most Chrome apps work and is easiest to implement. For HTML5 games and such, I'm sure it's more app-like in that you may not be able to launch the game without installing the app, but most people basically just redirect users to the normal site. Obviously this makes the use of the name "app" seem bizarre, but the advantage for ChromeOS users is that we make it easier to get back to Wikipedia. (One step instead of three.)
As a ChromeOS user I really just think of it as a laptop with a funky set of apps. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought to search for a wikipedia app for it because I'm so used to getting wikipedia in the browser.
On the other hand if the app could modify search key behaviour so I can hit search, type wikipedia, hit tab, type search term, then hit enter, then I'd like that. On the other other hand I already have this behaviour in all browser windows so from (pretty much) anywhere in the OS I can hit ctrl-t, ctrl-l, type wikipedia, hit tab, type search term, then hit enter. Also, it feels like that search key behaviour is up to google anyway and at some point they'll make it work the same as the location bar.
Nik
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:00 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd recommend against building any specific 'app' for a web-based OS like this, but if we can have a Chrome Web Store entry that conveniently bookmarks us and that makes us easier to use, well that'd be awesome.
You mean you recommend against OS-specific apps, like we have specific apps for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android? ;)
Snark aside: what you proposed is essentially how most Chrome apps work and is easiest to implement. For HTML5 games and such, I'm sure it's more app-like in that you may not be able to launch the game without installing the app, but most people basically just redirect users to the normal site. Obviously this makes the use of the name "app" seem bizarre, but the advantage for ChromeOS users is that we make it easier to get back to Wikipedia. (One step instead of three.) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:00 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd recommend against building any specific 'app' for a web-based OS like this, but if we can have a Chrome Web Store entry that conveniently bookmarks us and that makes us easier to use, well that'd be awesome.
You mean you recommend against OS-specific apps, like we have specific apps for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android? ;)
Windows Phone, iOS, and Android aren't web-based OSs -- a web site doesn't get full access to the system on them.
We are currently working on OS-specific (not HTML-based) apps for iOS and Android for the Commons photo uploader, but Firefox OS and Chrome OS get to make do with the web sites. :)
Note that we don't have a Windows Phone app at all (though there are some third-party ones -- and we do have a Windows 8 tablet app that's mostly experimental). The official iOS and Android Wikipedia apps in the stores are currently unmaintained, and will get replaced in a few months...
We're still evaluating how much balancing between native code and web-based code to use on the new versions (ultimately a Wikipedia app is a big wrapper around a web view with the actual content; we'll move at least some of the chrome out to native for performance and integration reasons). But we do know we don't want to use the "pure locally-hosted HTML 5 app stuck in a WebView" approach of PhoneGap, which required us to have two HTML frontends (the site, and the app) *and* be stuck with the limitations of mobile web browsers *and* have to debug the framework ourselves a lot. :)
Snark aside: what you proposed is essentially how most Chrome apps work and is easiest to implement. For HTML5 games and such, I'm sure it's more app-like in that you may not be able to launch the game without installing the app, but most people basically just redirect users to the normal site. Obviously this makes the use of the name "app" seem bizarre, but the advantage for ChromeOS users is that we make it easier to get back to Wikipedia. (One step instead of three.)
Excellent. :)
-- brion
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