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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
techpopsDec 10th 2009 7:29AM
Reading this it almost seems like you ignored all the information that came out recently from Google about ChromeOS.
"But I've been scratching my head for a while, wondering why anyone would want an operating system or device that does so much less than existing options"
It's free, it auto updates itself, probably much better security than Windows or OS X by its very read only nature. Free software ready to go that again needs no updating. Less to learn and therefore easier to use. Based on an already familiar concept, that of the browser that most people understand and it has Googles name to give it credibility which could be witnessed by the feeding frenzy on blogs the world over when Google announced it without actually showing a line of code.
"But it's kind of nice to have the ability to save data to your hard drive, edit documents while on an airplane, play video games, or run apps you're used to such as Office or Photoshop."
HTML5 answers the first part with its offline capabilities. I think we can pretty much assume at this point that data will be available locally as will the apps where it makes sense. I mean that's mostly true right now with web apps from Google.
And as for two industry standard professional applications in Office and Photoshop, they just don't seem relevant to what ChromeOS is as described by Google themselves.
I'm sure there will be alternatives, some good ones you can use right now today, but really good ones in a years time that can use most of the data formats professionals use. Overall for the target audience of ChromeOS powered devices, this doesn't really seem important.
Clearly you're ignoring pretty much everything about ChromeOS so you can sing the praises of some unknown thing, that has as much chance of catching on in the mainstream, as every other me too product that's going to be springing up in the wake of ChromeOS.
MagnaCartaHGDec 10th 2009 7:30AM
"Clearly you're ignoring pretty much everything about ChromeOS so you can sing the praises of some unknown thing, that has as much chance of catching on in the mainstream, as every other me too product that's going to be springing up in the wake of ChromeOS."
Dude, aren't you reading Download Squad? Don't you like downloading new apps and installing them on your computer? I think point that was made by the previous commenter is valid given the context.
The question I have is this: Sure Google Chrome is fast, but you need offline access or it's not a reliable system. But once I'm running these offline versions of websites, aren't I losing the benefit of having big sites with big servers do stuff for me? This isn't a big issue with sites like Google Docs where most of the content is my files, but what about if I want to play games?
We're moving to a period where browsers are gaining a lot of useful upgrades. Flash is hardware accelerated, WebGL will come to browsers, and Opera now has a built in web server and a bittorrent client. Aren't we just building all of the overhead back into the browser?
Power users might not have as much of an interest in using just a browser, but eventually if this becomes the norm, won't I still need a computer good enough to run Photoshop without a server in order to use "Photoshop Online" on a plane? (Or any situation without the internet)
Basically it's hard for me to believe that people won't eventually end up wanting all of the programs that you want to use offline to be available online. I think the browser is faster now, because it's a limited use application, but once you rely on it for your OS, people will want more and developers will have to make more complex applications with more offline overhead.
And no, I don't that mean the average person who only checks their Facebook and E-Mail will be unsatisfied because they can't play Crysis on their netbook. I simply expect the browser to become more complicated as time goes by.