Life through a browser" is the prophetic slogan of Mindseye, company I used to work for over 10 years ago. Unfortunately for them, the concept seems to be longer-lived than they. Mindseye's no longer operating, so far as I know, but the idea that more and more of our daily work and personal interactions will take place online is one that many companies are betting on. One such bet is Google's Chromebook-- a computer-like object in a laptop form-factor that runs nothing but the Chrome browser.
Google's pitch to users is "Chromebooks are built and optimized for the web, where you already spend most of your computing time. So you get a faster, simpler and more secure experience without all the headaches of ordinary computers." I was pretty curious to see whether this premise was true, and now that I've taken delivery of my own Chromebook, I have the perfect chance to find out: just how much of my work can I perform completely through a browser?
I'll report on what I find later today, but my guess is that while I'll be able to spend the bulk of my time on the Chromebook (email, chat, web browsing), my most important tasks (editing code and FTPing files) will still need to happen via applications on my MacBook Pro laptop.
Comments (1)
July 22, 2011
11:42AM | #
I received one of Google's CR48s right when they were first going sending the test units out. I will admit, for a casual user it is probably all they would need. My wife loves it (she still uses it to this day). However, for a power user the limitations will quickly get to you.