Does Google Really Have A Secret OS?
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What some of us have suspected for a long time may be coming closer to reality. In an article about Net Applications and their report made about Microsoft’s slide to under 90% market share for their OS, another observation was also made. It seems that Net Applications can determine with accuracy, the operating system of those who surf the Internet. That is all except one. It seems that the folks from Google who surf, are using a OS that is not known to the outside world.
According to the article it states:
“We have never seen an OS stripped off the user agent string before,” Vizzaccaro told InternetNews.com. “I believe you have to arrange to have that happen, it’s not something we’ve seen before with a proxy server. All I can tell you is there’s a good percentage of the people at Google showing up [at Web pages] with their OS hidden.”
A proxy server shouldn’t cause such a block because it would block everything, which Net Applications sees all the time. With the one-third obfuscated Google visitors, it was only the OS that was removed. Their browser, for example, was not hidden. And two-thirds of Google systems surfing the Web identified their OS, mostly Linux.
Does this mean that Google has a secret OS that it is trying to hide?
“I think they could be working on an application infrastructure, because an operating system really connotes the stuff that makes the hardware and software talk to each other, and they are not in that business,” said Clay Ryder, president of The Sageza Group.
“But as an infrastructure for building network apps, I would think Google would be working on something like that,” he continued. “They’ve been rolling out more and more freebie apps and I would think they would eventually want to make some money the old fashioned way. It would make a lot of sense that they would want to have a network app infrastructure that they could roll out most anywhere.”
What do you think? Is Google going to surprise the world and introduce their own operating system to compete head on with Microsoft?
Comments welcome.
9 Comments
RJGowan
December 5th, 2008
at 9:31am
I certainly hope so.
While MS should be lauded for making personal computing popular, they have increasingly caused the user experience to be more dangerous and frustrating. Compare that with the outstanding contributions Google has made to the user experience in relatively few years.
rod
December 5th, 2008
at 1:50pm
google does have an internal os named goobuntu. its just ubuntu customized for the google folks. its not planned for any kind of release but it does explain the user agent oddity.
Titus Brown
December 5th, 2008
at 2:54pm
The user agent string comes from the browser, not the OS.
Ron Schenone
December 5th, 2008
at 3:58pm
Thanks for the comments and for sharing your expertise with us.
Chris
December 5th, 2008
at 8:37pm
To be honest, this sounds like ignorance at its finest.
Google has a lot of tricky stuff going on in their datacenters. Where MS fails at designing a filesystem, Linux filesystems are no better, and to this end the filers at G’s datacenters are openly acknowledged as full of black magic. How else would they manage such a massive operation?
However, they also have perfectly normal people working on perfectly normal computers. I’ve met a lot of Googlers, from engineers to sales people and even their FOSS licensing compliance guy. They all ran either Windows or some variant of Debian linux (debian, ubuntu etc.).
There is no challenge to removing an OS from a user agent string. There’s a very clearly defined file within Firefox’ source code base (for example…), that calculates the user agent string to send. A ten year old could override this if they needed to.
At the same time, they would be err away from mangling the source code of their web browser.
In corporate environments, everyone uses proxy servers, to varying degrees of interruption. In particular, proxy servers regularly modify the headers of outgoing HTTP requests. When working outside of this proxy server - i.e. outside the company network(s) - it would be hard to identify the user as a Google employee.
In all probability, they sanitize UA strings for the sole purpose of avoiding useless speculation by “journalists” such as yourself.
Karl
December 5th, 2008
at 10:35pm
Occam’s Razor suggests that the employees are most likely running a modified browser that does not report the host OS.
I’m not saying that’s the case, I’m just saying that’s a simpler solution to the stated conundrum.
J. Alexander Crough
December 5th, 2008
at 10:49pm
The user agent string is set by the browser, and the browser reads the OS.
In Opera, and in Firefox via an add-on, you can set the user agent string to whatever you like. There is no difficult process to hide one’s OS.
The Google agent string of which you speak is their bot, which does not report the OS it is using.
Ron Schenone
December 6th, 2008
at 5:14am
Thanks for the comments.
Barl
December 13th, 2008
at 7:32pm
“Occam’s Razor suggests that the employees are most likely ”
- Karl.
No, Occam’s Razor suggests that they’re using a proxy that’s removing/filtering the OS from the user agent.