Google recently unveiled the publication of a full version of the web browser Chromium for Fuchsia OS, which will replace the previously offered "Simple Browser" browser in the list of applications, designed to run stand-alone web applications and not to work with sites.
Indirectly, providing support for a regular web browser confirms Google's intention to develop Fuchsia not only for IoT and consumer devices like the Nest Hub, but also for desktop platforms.
The Chromium build interface for Fuchsia is generally similar to builds for other desktop systems, with the exception of single glitches and bugs, such as problems displaying context menus and opening multiple windows.
At the same time, recently active work has been done to eliminate such problems, for example, support for the built-in PDF viewer and the ability to print were provided the other day.
In the Reddit post by oldschool-51 he shares some screenshots and the following:
what doesn't work?
If you quit Chrome, you'll end up with a black emulator screen; I don't see any way to get back to the desktop.
The mouse scroll wheel behaves differently than it normally does. Instead of scrolling down the page, it acts as "click"
On my computer the "spin box" doesn't work, it just crashes.
The fx command never works from the ~ area though jiri does, you have to switch to fuchsia for it to work,
What DOES work is the experimental ffx emu command if you enable it per the instructions.
Building Fuchsia is huge - it takes over 80g of my 128g ssd in my Asus pn41 case, so I couldn't build from normal Ubuntu, but Lubuntu is fine for this. Still, it's been 7 hours on a quad core N5100 celeron with 16g ram, so one of those things you can do overnight!
Recall that Fuchsia OS has been developed by Google since 2016, taking into account the shortcomings in terms of scaling and security on the Android platform. The system is based on the Zircon microkernel, based on the developments of the LK project, extended for use in various classes of devices, including smartphones and personal computers. Zircon extends LK with support for shared libraries and processes, a user level, an object management system, and a capabilities-based security model.
Controllers are implemented as loaded user space dynamic libraries by the devhost process and managed by the device manager (devmg, Device Manager).
Fuchsia has its own graphical interface written in Dart using the Flutter framework. The project also develops the Peridot UI framework, the Fargo package manager, the libc standard library, the Escher rendering system, the Magma Vulkan driver, the Scenic composite manager, MinFS, MemFS, ThinFS (FAT language in Go) and the Blobfs file, as well as the FVM partition manager. For application development, support is provided for C/C++, Dart, Rust is also allowed in system components, in the Go network stack, and in the Python language build system.
The boot process uses a system manager that includes appmgr to create the initial software environment, sysmgr to create the boot environment, and basemgr to set up the user environment and organize login.
To ensure security, an advanced sandbox isolation system is proposed, in which new processes do not have access to kernel objects, cannot allocate memory, and cannot execute code, and a namespace system is used to access resources, which determines the available permissions.
The platform provides a framework for building components, which are programs that run in its sandbox and can interact with other components via IPC.
To watch the current state of development of Fuchsia, the emulator can be used, as well as test builds from the dahliaOS project that we recently talked about its new version released here.