Report: Aura Window Manager, I'm confused.

A while back when messing with the chromium OS development branch on my nettop i stumbled upon Aura, a Window manager for the Chromium "desktop". I put it down to Google doing their usual "trow the kitchen sink at developers and see what sticks" approach to things and left it at that. Much to my surprise i saw that Google where planning on pushing this update out to all Chromebooks and that it has already done so with to the beta branch of Chromium OS. Dont get me wrong Aura is cool, it is always nice to see new window managers especially those with admittedly tasty looking compositing in the Linux world springing up, but it begs the question; doesn't this completely defeat the value proposition of Chrome OS?

The idea that you boot straight into the browser and you dont have to deal with the frill and bloat a desktop brings is a good one and one i completely understood. What i do not get, is instead of giving the users a full blown desktop or a leaving them with the pre-existing kiosk style Chrome UI they have done neither, leaving you with a watered down desktop environment that can only launch multiple instances of Chrome.

If Google insists on using Aura then they should at least relegate it to use on larger, higher resolution displays and leave the standard Chrome UI for smaller ones. It is unclear how Aura will fit in to the platform as Google preps for the launch of the next tier of Ivy Bridge powered Chromebooks but one this is for certain, they need to think low and hard on how they play this so they don't completely loose sights of their initial goals and the whole reason Chrome OS exists in the first place.

On a side note, the code for the Aura window manager is publicly available here and i can see a lot interest in it being forked and used as the basis for a lightweight desktop environment.

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