? Chrome Book

[sizbut]

I have my me DVD happily tested on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Then a colleague walks in with a Chrome Book on which we will shortly be supporting some of our products.

Has this been looked at at all? - that is getting the Flying Ant to run as a web server and support CGI search on the Chrome OS.

Meanwhile just going into the Website folder and opening an HTML file did launch my content and run it impressively fast. Just obviously the search didn't run.

[David]

The Chome book market has already fragmented. There are multiple different fundamentally incompatible versions. Some are built on ARM chips and some are build on Intel x86 chips. This doesn't matter if you are only browsing the web, as Chrome books were designed to do, but it does matter if you are trying to run a software application (as opposed to an App from the Google store).

Regardless of chip compatibility, Google have also made it near impossible to directly load software on to Chromebooks. You can't delivery a DVD to people with software to run on their Chromebook.

So the best solution is to either,
- Create a custom Chrome App and put it in the Google store.
- Run the search function in the cloud and just use the Chromebook as a dump browser.
- Use the Zoom Javascript search option as part of a web page instead of FlyingAnt.

Chromebook are designed to be permanently connected to the internet. So running the search function in the cloud is probably the best option. Please don't tell me you have customers buying Chromebooks for offline work?

[sizbut]

The FlyingAnt DVD/USB version of our site is used by installers at times when the product network might not have external internet access so yes, occasionally 'offline' (plus many of the installers just like having their own local copy of the site even when they could use the real site).


Fortunately each of the sub-sets of HTML on the DVD has its own JavaScript based search (by happy coincidence based on the embedded ZoomSearch feature provided by the Help & Manual authoring tool) so they are not totally searchless when the CGI won't work.


I'll look at using JavaScript to detect if my pages are running on Chrome OS and if so then either hide or provide some alternate for the full set search (I suspect the full set is too big for a JavaScript based search to be an option).


Many thanks for the quick summary of the ChromeOS scene. Fortunately from my server logs at the moment it only account for 0.3% of my users but with our being about to provide ChromeOS based products that's about to change so I need to up my knowledge.