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Chrome OS Isn't Ready For Tablets Yet (theverge.com)
The Verge's Dieter Bohn set out to review Acer's Chromebook Tab 10 tablet, but ended up sharing his impressions of using Chrome OS instead. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from his review: If you're not familiar with Chrome OS, you should know that there are three different tracks you can run Chrome OS on. There's "Stable," which is what most people should use. It's the build I mostly used while testing this device and coming to the conclusions you see above. Then there's "Beta," which is a little on the edge but has been pretty solid for me. Lots of people run it to get slightly earlier access to new features. But because I wanted to see what the future of Chrome looks like, I also looked at the "Developer" build. Most people shouldn't do this. It's buggy and maybe a little less secure. Here be monsters. On a tablet, Chrome OS looks and feels a lot like it does when you have a keyboard. There's a button to get to your apps, a task bar along the bottom, and a system menu in the lower-right corner. In the Developer build, you'll find more squarish tabs and a system menu that's been "Android-ified," so it looks like the Quick Settings you'd see on an Android phone.
By default, all apps in Chrome OS go to full screen in tablet mode. Recently, however, split screen was rolled out. You tap the multitasking button on the lower right, drag one window to the left, then pick another open window to fill the right (or vice versa). You can then drag the divider to set up a one-third / two-thirds split screen if you like. That's all well and good, but it's the next steps that make this whole thing feel not quite baked. If you rotate the tablet 180 degrees, everything flips. So if you had a notepad open on the left and Chrome open on the right, when you flip it, the notepad ends up on the right. I found it disconcerting, but perhaps that's just a matter of it being different instead of it being broken. Different UX strokes for different OS folks. [...] I don't want to be too harsh on the lagginess I experienced because it's unfair to judge software that's still in development. But I did experience a lot, even on the more stable builds. That's a particularly egregious problem when there's no physical keyboard. If there's one thing that will drive a user crazy, it's input lag. And I saw much too much of that, even on the Stable build, which is what most educators will experience with this tablet. I also felt at times that I was struggling to hit buttons with my finger that would have been no problem if I had a mouse.
By default, all apps in Chrome OS go to full screen in tablet mode. Recently, however, split screen was rolled out. You tap the multitasking button on the lower right, drag one window to the left, then pick another open window to fill the right (or vice versa). You can then drag the divider to set up a one-third / two-thirds split screen if you like. That's all well and good, but it's the next steps that make this whole thing feel not quite baked. If you rotate the tablet 180 degrees, everything flips. So if you had a notepad open on the left and Chrome open on the right, when you flip it, the notepad ends up on the right. I found it disconcerting, but perhaps that's just a matter of it being different instead of it being broken. Different UX strokes for different OS folks. [...] I don't want to be too harsh on the lagginess I experienced because it's unfair to judge software that's still in development. But I did experience a lot, even on the more stable builds. That's a particularly egregious problem when there's no physical keyboard. If there's one thing that will drive a user crazy, it's input lag. And I saw much too much of that, even on the Stable build, which is what most educators will experience with this tablet. I also felt at times that I was struggling to hit buttons with my finger that would have been no problem if I had a mouse.
Just forget about it.
How about sticking with ONE interface paradigm? A standard desktop windowing system.
All you need to do is make it scale, and that's not a problem anymore with the high resolution of devices.
You'll still have the unsolvable problem of having to draw a shitty on screen keyboard on top of everything for certain devices, but so what? That's unavoidable.
I don't want a dumbed down interface on websites. I don't want it on my desktop. I don't want it on laptops. I don't want it on tablets. I don't want it on phones.
And yes, I have used phones as displays for my actual desktop computers via RDP and TeamViewer. It's not ideal, but it's totally fine even without scaling.
I have a Chromebook. It gets input lag EVEN WITH A KEYBOARD. While just about any app I want to run will run on it, many times, it simply does things the Android way - Even in multitask mode, if I have Camfrog open, and Chrome open, switching from Camfrog to Chrome with a simple mouse click kills my camera in Camfrog, forcing me to unpause it when I go back.
Google's Engineers don't know their heads from their asses. When your Windows chrome Omnibar insists on doing a search on a FULL URL YOU JUST TYPED WITH THE INTENT TO GO DIRECTLY TO THAT SITE, you know Google doesn't even have the bare basics done right for a fucking web browser, let alone a full-blown OS. (No, I use F6 to go directly to the omnibar, all my newly-opened tabs are blank so no searchbar in the middle of the page to go to, and I use the enter key on the keypad to avoid accidental shift-enter searches.)
It's a good thing I didn't pay for the Chromebook. No buyer's remorse, here, since I have no sunk cost. It's just a toy I can use to show people just how shitty the Google experience is in reality.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Seems Chrome OS ain't any different to Android: laggy as fuck.
Google, it seems, are totally incapable of making proper OSes. Who knew?
They seriously need to give higher priority to system and user input apps.
Even I have experienced it on my tablet a few times when running a fairly heavy task while editing a text file at the same time, and input could be laggy by about 0.2-4 seconds. That's jarring as fuck.
Why is that still not fixed and we are 8 damn versions in and across 2 separate OSes?
Seriously guys. Get the basics down first. What is this, amateur hour?
Then again, it's Amateur Hour every hour at Google. They never have been good with software for the most part.
Chrome is shit. Can't count how many times I have had to fix machines where profiles have corrupted themselves, or Google Update has corrupted the install, or the update fails for some crazy unknown reason, or many others.
Android is shit. A bastardized hack on top of Linux that takes all of the niceties of Linux and says "FUUUUUUUCK OFF" and defecates all over it. Files everywhere, messy, breaks the security models that keeps it generally safe, and input lag out the ass when anything is using about 50% CPU. (and that happens at random, not constant lag, WHAT?!)
Chrome OS is seemingly just as shit. Why they are so incapable of making a decent multi-tasking system is hilarious. It's funny that Samsung had a better system years ago and they never took that up in to the main OS, instead they had a little hissy fit and done it on their own. Still inferior even today. The only good thing Android native has now is the ability to float an app, which some apps let you do to ANY app. (Floating App is the one I prefer, works well and is simple enough)
Picasa was shit. I can only stomach a database corrupting itself 3 times before I permanently uninstall awful software. I knew Picasa was too good to be true. It worked so well. But then THE GOOG happened, classic Goog, gotta throw a few inabilities to deal with file writing properly. What's Google software without file corruption?
All their websites are shit as well now. Filled with memey hipster code and memory leaks - highly nested and "optimized", which is slow as hell for browsers to parse and JIT compile. Trivial to fix as well, generate proper unfucked JS, write it to a virtual file / script element, init, done. Na, too hard for Google it seems.
This is why Gmail got so slower all of a sudden years back, why Google Wave was hilariously slow, why Google Docs is crap for anything large, Spreadsheets too, why Youtube is impossible to watch on Netbooks now for no real reason considering the mobile site with higher resolution works PERFECTLY FINE, why Google Maps is a lagfest on anything a few years old, etc.
Literally the last decent software Google had created was Google Talk, and that's dead. Well, all their software about pre... oh, 2007ish give or take a year.
What happened? Why has Google fallen so hard?
Google used to be known as THAT company. The top company. The one all the talent went to.
Now? College-dropout tier company. Summer-course company. It's an embarrassment. A shadow of a shadow of what Google used to be.
The only good parts of Google are the very niche areas that they are heavily investing in to, like AI.
Everything else is SHIT.
From my favourite company to pretty much one of my most hated in a decade.
I respect Microsoft more. And they made Windows 10!
This is what happens to a company who prioritizes hiring women and the brown skinned over talented engineers.
The products suck and nobody with self worth wants to be surrounded by SJW assholes.
I saw off of Google the other day that the PixelBook is type-C USB on the horizon. Understand though that Type-C USB is all or nothing. Talking Type-C hell in Nintendo, Google, Apple, and thinking that you need to keep type C USB off of the PC. I saw a code out the other day on my AMD Ryzen 5 with people trying to mess with USB-C. Trust me - the codeout is worse than messing around with RAMDAC Code.
Sorry, I don't agree. I've been working with (and programming for) Chromebooks for a number of years now and they are really quite excellent laptops as long as you understand the model in which they're designed.
They're not stand alone systems, they need an internet link. They are Google so that you need a gmail account and understand how to use GDrive resources. Where they really shine is in the classroom and they're pretty good systems for letting your kids work with.
I'm confused by your reference to Camfrog because I don't believe that there's a Chrome Extension for that app - there is one for Android and if you're using that, then you probably will have problems on a Chromebook because Android apps are still somewhat marginal.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Looking at the comments and I feel like they've been taken a bit out of context - I don't think you can judge ChromeOS by a tablet application.
Touch screen operation on ChromeOS is not great and I would agree that a tablet based on it is somewhat premature.
Chromebooks are really quite nice Google based thin clients with a keyboard and a trackpad/mouse.
The review got off track in a number is instances (ie describing Stable, Beta and Dev channels) but I would agree with Dieter Bohn that ChromeOS tablets aren't ready for prime time and you will see an evolution through the regular upgrades.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
(I'm an Android user, I don't give a flying fook about ChromeOS.)
Windows interfaces need a lot of work to resize and move windows. Lots of small things to click on etc. this needs a mouse. And a mouse needs a stable screen, since you're using your eyes to coordinate hand actions to screen actions, the screen can't move around. So it should sit on a desk.
Hence it works on the desktop. ChromeOS with its windows version, with a mouse and screen sitting on a desk, that's fine. But I don't want it.
I don't need or want ChromeOS. It adds nothing to Android. I don't care that Google had two OS's, or twenty two OS's it wanted to merge. That's their problem.
Why on earth would you take an OS that has 3 billion installs and cripple it by grafting on an OS with 10 million installs? From the users perspective, what purpose does this serve. I know Pichai ran ChromeOS, but that's not a reason, that's internal politics and ego.
Google, you have a very popular OS, Android, with shortcomings. Notably the lifecycle of apps, you kill them when they're not finished, and leave them running when they are. "Back and close' are confused and merged. The windowing system is still not right, an app should not have to be resizable to be in a window. The usability of multiple apps on screen is not correct yet. You split, start, adjust start, adjust.... its not intuitive, its not friendly.
None of these shortcomings are addressed by slapping your ChromeOS crap ontop.
Now you've forked Android 3 ways, a cut down version 'Go', a ChromeOS/Android merge, and the mainstream. Why?
Go get buried in a pile of shit which is then set on fire so you can die in a shit fire. I bet you're a pedo.
" If you want to use most of your services in the browser, ChromeOS is perfectly suitable"
Yeh, but so is the browser(s) in Android. ChromeOS didn't add browser support to Android it already had excellent browsers.
"Google is great about telling developers to make apps adjust to the bigger screen"
Yeh this is the dumb idea that tablets should use the screen for ONE app, and the app should magically make use of all the screen by somehow adjusting the layout to use up the screen while not changing the interface paradigm so its familiar to the user.
[A] i.e. dipshit logic copied from the iPad when it was essentially single tasking and never fixed since. Portrait apps don't need to be resizeable to run portrait, yet their implementation of multi-window does(!) If they didn't make apps to run in *two* sizes (landscape and portrait), then why would they make it run in N size ratios. It wouldn't make sense interface wise.
"Apps for Android on tablets just suck"
Because they're designed for portrait phones, and need to stay like that for a consistent user interface. See [A].
"Chromebook hardware is just really nice"
Note 8 + Dex, or Samsung Tab S. Faster, slimer, brighter, longer battery life, more accessories. You can't sell ChromeOS on its hardware separate from the software it runs as if the features are bought separately.