it's only in the last couple of years that we have actually gotten there, through wider 3G/4G coverage
Which carries a substantial recurring fee. I already pay for Internet at home. Why should I have to pay again to be able to use my own computer while riding the city bus?
If course, you're not paying to use your own computer, you're paying for Internet access while you're on the go. You can use a Chromebook while offline now, you know.
I may be a bit privileged in this area, as we have free wifi on the busses and trains around here. And my mobile subscription is $17/month, which includes 3GB data. That's actually quite a lot of data, even with heavy use of my phone for tethering and watching Youtube etc., the highest I've ever used in a month is 1.5GB.
Why do you think centralizing computing power is such a bad thing?
Because as implemented, it restricts me from choosing with whom to centralize computing power.
No, it's actually pretty easy to choose where to centralize computing power. Just off the top of my head, you can choose between Google (ChromeOS, Google Drive, Google Docs etc.), Microsoft (Skydrive, Office365, Outlook.com etc.) and Apple (iCloud, iTunes etc.).
Can you install an alternative browser on ChromeOS? No, because the browser is actually the shell. But you can easily use competing web-based services, no problem. So it's pretty much the same situation as with iOS, where you can only install different UIs for the default Safari browser, but nothing's stopping you from installing Google Drive or Dropbox etc. and using them instead of iCloud storage.
And why would Google want to offer alternative data vendors on their platform?
Because a country's competition regulator may decide that Google has market power over operating systems that ship on laptop computers with 10" displays and thus require them to do so.
They already offer access to alternative data vendors, nothing's preventing you from using Outlook.com instead of Gmail and Skydrive instead of Google Drive.
As long as Apple aren't forced to open up the iPhone/iPad platforms, I don't think Google will be forced to open up the ChromeOS platform.
When basically all of the other developers go "WTF, why was this even suggested?" at something, maybe it's time to rethink whether you're in the right place. How can someone be so damn pigheaded about a stupid-ass decision?
I think the Lenovo Yoga Chromebook with the screen that folds 360 degrees around to make a superfat tablet is probably the only reasonable touch Chromebook right now. Load up web pages in fullscreen portrait mode and you can browse away kinda like on a tablet. That's probably the only use I can think of, though.
I have this problem already on a 2560x1440 27" monitor, I can't imagine having them reduced to a quarter of the size they are now:-O
Yeah yeah, I know everyone's going to run then pixel-doubled for sharper cleaner graphics and text, but it would be hilarious to run it at 1:1 for a while.
And when you plug in a keyboard, you've just made a laptop! Which just underlines the fact that tablets by themselves have limited usable value. And that's before you take the severely limited phone/tablet apps into consideration. I would hate having to be locked into a watered down mobile edition of a browser.
E: "Why shouldn't that be centralized?" is what I meant, of course.
And of course just mentioning games is shortsighted. There are plenty of tasks that need local processing power, such as CAD, (most) video editing and other heavy tasks where you need to work directly on the data or work in a latency-critical situation. There are a lot more tasks than can easily be centralized and accessed through thin clients or web-based solutions.
Well yes, some data is sent back to Google when you use Chrome. This includes searches and partial searches for autocomplete suggestions. It also sends back 404 results for pages than don't handle those themselves, again for suggestion purposes. Crash statistics and anonymized performance reporting is sent as well, if you opt-in. All of this can be switched off.
And of course your synced bookmarks, tabs, passwords and so on are sent to Google, encrypted with either your Google credentials or a passphrase of your own choosing.
There are also a couple of other things, like a one-time unique ID sent back if you downloaded Chrome during certain promotional campaigns, for statistics on how well they worked.
You can check all of this using Wireshark, if you care.
Samsung suffers from a major case of NIH syndrome, and TouchWiz is the most visible manifestation of it. They really really want to run their devices on an in-house built OS, but it's failed every time. Tizen is just the latest example.
It's painfully obvious why they fail if you've ever used a piece of Samsung software for any amount of time. It's just shit, all of it. Shitty thrown-together applications with no semblance of stability or any kind of thoughtful UI design. Kies is the very worst of them, never have I ever had to use a piece of software as shitty as that turd.
No, of course centralization is not the answer for everything. Stuff like games need a certain amount of processing and graphical power on the local machine.
But for big data crunching tasks, compiling and the like, why should that be centralized?
Android compatibility wasn't part of the original plan for ChromeOS. Would you rather have had to wait 2-3 years and then have a big announcement that Google has secretly been building Android compatibility?
Or would you agree the current approach is better, since Google needs to get the app developers in on this thing, too? It's not like every Android app will magically work, a bunch of them will probably need code changes. Would you have preferred Google to keep everything secret and then spring the surprise on the developers, leading to another year or two of frantic reprogramming to ensure ChromeOS compatibility?
I agree 100%. Android/iOS are absolutely brilliant for phone-sized screens, where the lack of multi-window multitasking isn't an issue and the use cases are generally very simple. But having owned and used tablets with both OSes, it's not something I really want to go back to. Why limit yourself to single-application glorified fingerpainting, when a mouse/touchpad and keyboard offers so much more functionality? I don't understand it.
Of course, some people have their needs served perfectly by tablets, and that's fine. But they obviously have very simplistic use cases.
Tablets can (and have) replaced laptops for some uses such as reading news, playing simplistic games and fighting boredom while on the toilet. But for literally anything that requires more detailed input than what glorified fingerpainting can achieve, you need more featureful computers with hardware keyboards and more precise pointing devices. Sure, you can add a keyboard and a mouse to a tablet, but then you've just made a laptop that is still hobbled by the simplistic tablet-designed apps.
I used to own an Android tablet. I currently own an iPad Air that was given to me. Both systems are absolutely horrible for anything more involved than pointing or swiping, and that goes for the apps as well. They're fine for reading news or forums or watching videos on Youtube, but everything else is terrible. The app I use the most on my iPad is Paper by FiftyThree. Fittingly enough for the tablet platform, it's a fingerpainting app.
People tend to laugh at visionaries when they are far ahead of their time. He made the proclamation 20 years ago, but it's only in the last couple of years that we have actually gotten there, through wider 3G/4G coverage and HTML5/WebGL/asm.js and so on.
SaaS and cloud services are full steam ahead, and I really do think subscription-based software will be even bigger in the future. Why do you think centralizing computing power is such a bad thing? It has giving us things like voice recognition on mobile devices (Siri/Google Voice/Cortana), even though the devices in question have nowhere near the processing power to do it themselves. By centralizing the heavy lifting, consumer devices can become sleeker, more featureful and have much better battery life, all of which are things the average consumer wants.
And why would Google want to offer alternative data vendors on their platform? You can install apps from Dropbox, Spideroak and various other cloud hosting services, but why would Google ever allow you to rip out Chrome and replace it with Firefox or another browser? Nevermind that Chrome literally is the OS, without it there is no ChromeOS.
I run straight Linux on my desktop (and 2003-vintage Thinkpad, for that matter), but looking at my general usage, roughly 70-80% of it happens in a browser. The rest includes watching movies, listening to music, word processing, chatting and email, the usual stuff. For mobile usage, it skews even further towards the browser.
A Chromebook will do all of that and boot to a browser in less than 10 seconds and have an all-day battery life and be super easy to maintain (no package conflicts!). Sometimes, you just want something that works without having to fiddle around with it.
I'll never give up my full-size desktop with the ~5TB storage, big monitor and great sound system, so a Chromebox as a desktop replacement is probably not for me, on that front I'm leaning more towards an Intel NUC or other small form factor PC as my eventual upgrade path, with a beefy NAS for storage. But for normal tasks while I'm on the road, a Chromebook is an easy choice.
(Plus, it's just a matter of time before the bootloaders are completely cracked open so you can install your favorite full-size Linux distro on a Chromebook).
You really sound like you have a bunch of Samsung stock, or maybe you're on Samsung's payroll, because no right-thinking individual can love Samsung that much. I have Samsung smartphones (S3 Mini and S4 Mini), and some of my family and colleagues have them too. The default interface TouchWiz is absolute garbage. Samsung insists on doing everything their own way, and they just end up breaking stuff. That's why my own S4 Mini has Cyanogenmod on it, which is much better, but still suffers from the limitations of an OS and applications primarily made for simplistic touch interfaces. It's fine for a phone or if a tablet satisfies your limited needs, but it completely breaks down for any sort of moderately-advanced use case.
And no, phones/tablets/phablets are not "the new style of laptop", they will never replace the laptop form factor. They may displace it slightly for simplistic use cases, but for anything even moderately advanced, the laptop (and desktop) is king. You could say that you're getting closer if you add a physical keyboard to your tablet, but then you've just recreated the physical layout of a laptop, while still being constrained by simplistic apps.
ChromeOS is not "Windows 7 with fewer apps", it's a fulfillment of the proclamation made by Marc Andreessen (head of Netscape at the time): "The browser will be the operating system". Even 3D graphics and games now run great within the browser, thanks to WebGL and asm.js. For instance, I haven't fired up Libreoffice in years, I use Google Docs instead. In ChromeOS, you can do literally everything that you can do in a Chrome browser on your fully-featured desktop. You can't do that with Android. And now ChromeOS (and desktop Chrome) will be running Android apps soon, as well. There's going to be a convergence, where the OS you run doesn't really matter in relation to what apps you can run, but the input system you're using determines which tasks are going to be feasible on any given type of device.
By "full support", you probably mean "unsupported extensions that Samsung has piled their own hacks onto". It is not a standardized solution at all, and it requires apps to be specifically written to make use of it.
Chrome OS seems to be selling quite well (refer to the oft-repeated "best selling laptop type on Amazon" etc.), to people who just want a straightforward web browsing device and to schools. It's true that right now ChromeOS only runs a handful of Android apps, but the plan is for full Android compatibility. Please explain how ChromeOS is not "a full OS". Sure, it's locked down by default, but so is Android. You have to jump through basically the same hoops to get root access, and literally everything Android can do, ChromeOS can do as well or better.
In my case, I want a device that will primarily let me use a browser, mail and a couple of other minor things like some games to waste some time. I want it to have great battery life and a physical keyboard. I also don't want to have to drag my fingers all over the screen to use it, leaving greasy fingerprints everywhere. I've had a tablet before, and I don't want another one.
I know there are Android-based laptops out there, but they're just not a very good option. The browsing experience alone is severely limited on Android compared to ChromeOS. There's no support for plugins on Android Chrome, and there are very few for Android Firefox. Not to mention that every single app is designed for touch input, with big fat buttons and super-simplified interfaces.
They're doing that now. Android apps are slowly trickling into the Chrome app store. They started out with Vine and Evernote and a couple of others, but the goal is to have every Android app run on Chrome as well.
It's been reported as a bug multiple times and closed, on the basis that they would rather load all tabs on startup than having the user wait for each tab individually. It's really a tossup between two non-ideal solutions. Last I heard, they're trying to optimize page loading to lessen the impact of loading a bunch of tabs simultaneously.
If I may ask, why are you loading a bunch of tabs on startup? I assume these are the same tabs every time, and that you're actually going to use these tabs actively as soon as they're loaded? In that case, I think loading them is a good idea, then they'll be ready for you.
On the other hand, if you're just keeping a bunch of pages open every single session because you'll want to go back to them at some point, why not just save them as bookmarks instead? That's what I realized I really should do instead of having 10-15 tabs that opened every time I started my browser, just for the purpose of going back to them at some vague point in the future.
Also, install ScriptSafe to block needless javascripting. Then go to chrome://chrome/settings/content and set plugins to "click to play". Pages will load much quicker:-)
Do you really honestly think that Google would want to sell out parts of their massive goldmine of data they've assembled? Of course they want to keep it to themselves, why give away the major advantage they have over competitors?
Absolutely, I was in the same camp of considering a Chromebook, but removal of extFS support could have made it a lot harder to work smoothly together with my Linux desktop. I'm glad the devs listen to the feedback they get and are willing to go back on their previous decisions if they prove hugely unpopular with the users.
Now, all I have to do is wait for the 64-bit Tegra K1 "Denver" Chromebooks to hit the market.
Slashdot Mirror
it's only in the last couple of years that we have actually gotten there, through wider 3G/4G coverage
Which carries a substantial recurring fee. I already pay for Internet at home. Why should I have to pay again to be able to use my own computer while riding the city bus?
If course, you're not paying to use your own computer, you're paying for Internet access while you're on the go. You can use a Chromebook while offline now, you know.
I may be a bit privileged in this area, as we have free wifi on the busses and trains around here. And my mobile subscription is $17/month, which includes 3GB data. That's actually quite a lot of data, even with heavy use of my phone for tethering and watching Youtube etc., the highest I've ever used in a month is 1.5GB.
Why do you think centralizing computing power is such a bad thing?
Because as implemented, it restricts me from choosing with whom to centralize computing power.
No, it's actually pretty easy to choose where to centralize computing power. Just off the top of my head, you can choose between Google (ChromeOS, Google Drive, Google Docs etc.), Microsoft (Skydrive, Office365, Outlook.com etc.) and Apple (iCloud, iTunes etc.).
Can you install an alternative browser on ChromeOS? No, because the browser is actually the shell. But you can easily use competing web-based services, no problem. So it's pretty much the same situation as with iOS, where you can only install different UIs for the default Safari browser, but nothing's stopping you from installing Google Drive or Dropbox etc. and using them instead of iCloud storage.
And why would Google want to offer alternative data vendors on their platform?
Because a country's competition regulator may decide that Google has market power over operating systems that ship on laptop computers with 10" displays and thus require them to do so.
They already offer access to alternative data vendors, nothing's preventing you from using Outlook.com instead of Gmail and Skydrive instead of Google Drive.
As long as Apple aren't forced to open up the iPhone/iPad platforms, I don't think Google will be forced to open up the ChromeOS platform.
And there's nothing preventing you from doing that on a Chromebook. After all, there's a basic text editor ;-)
But just off the top of my head, there's also Spark, Text, Tailor, ShiftEdit and Caret, all of which have syntax highlighting etc., and work offline.
When basically all of the other developers go "WTF, why was this even suggested?" at something, maybe it's time to rethink whether you're in the right place. How can someone be so damn pigheaded about a stupid-ass decision?
I think the Lenovo Yoga Chromebook with the screen that folds 360 degrees around to make a superfat tablet is probably the only reasonable touch Chromebook right now. Load up web pages in fullscreen portrait mode and you can browse away kinda like on a tablet. That's probably the only use I can think of, though.
I have this problem already on a 2560x1440 27" monitor, I can't imagine having them reduced to a quarter of the size they are now :-O
Yeah yeah, I know everyone's going to run then pixel-doubled for sharper cleaner graphics and text, but it would be hilarious to run it at 1:1 for a while.
And when you plug in a keyboard, you've just made a laptop! Which just underlines the fact that tablets by themselves have limited usable value. And that's before you take the severely limited phone/tablet apps into consideration. I would hate having to be locked into a watered down mobile edition of a browser.
Argh, "a lot more tasks that can easily be centralized", of course.
Fat fingers definitely need to be dealt with locally ;-)
E: "Why shouldn't that be centralized?" is what I meant, of course.
And of course just mentioning games is shortsighted. There are plenty of tasks that need local processing power, such as CAD, (most) video editing and other heavy tasks where you need to work directly on the data or work in a latency-critical situation. There are a lot more tasks than can easily be centralized and accessed through thin clients or web-based solutions.
FWIW, I agree with you that it should be an option. I don't know why neither Firefox nor Chrome offers it, apart from developer pigheadedness.
andreport everything you do back to Google
Well yes, some data is sent back to Google when you use Chrome. This includes searches and partial searches for autocomplete suggestions. It also sends back 404 results for pages than don't handle those themselves, again for suggestion purposes. Crash statistics and anonymized performance reporting is sent as well, if you opt-in. All of this can be switched off.
And of course your synced bookmarks, tabs, passwords and so on are sent to Google, encrypted with either your Google credentials or a passphrase of your own choosing.
There are also a couple of other things, like a one-time unique ID sent back if you downloaded Chrome during certain promotional campaigns, for statistics on how well they worked.
You can check all of this using Wireshark, if you care.
Samsung suffers from a major case of NIH syndrome, and TouchWiz is the most visible manifestation of it. They really really want to run their devices on an in-house built OS, but it's failed every time. Tizen is just the latest example.
It's painfully obvious why they fail if you've ever used a piece of Samsung software for any amount of time. It's just shit, all of it. Shitty thrown-together applications with no semblance of stability or any kind of thoughtful UI design. Kies is the very worst of them, never have I ever had to use a piece of software as shitty as that turd.
No, of course centralization is not the answer for everything. Stuff like games need a certain amount of processing and graphical power on the local machine.
But for big data crunching tasks, compiling and the like, why should that be centralized?
Sure, that can also happen.
It's not really the case regarding extFS support in the ChromeOS file manager, though.
Android compatibility wasn't part of the original plan for ChromeOS. Would you rather have had to wait 2-3 years and then have a big announcement that Google has secretly been building Android compatibility?
Or would you agree the current approach is better, since Google needs to get the app developers in on this thing, too? It's not like every Android app will magically work, a bunch of them will probably need code changes. Would you have preferred Google to keep everything secret and then spring the surprise on the developers, leading to another year or two of frantic reprogramming to ensure ChromeOS compatibility?
I agree 100%. Android/iOS are absolutely brilliant for phone-sized screens, where the lack of multi-window multitasking isn't an issue and the use cases are generally very simple. But having owned and used tablets with both OSes, it's not something I really want to go back to. Why limit yourself to single-application glorified fingerpainting, when a mouse/touchpad and keyboard offers so much more functionality? I don't understand it.
Of course, some people have their needs served perfectly by tablets, and that's fine. But they obviously have very simplistic use cases.
Tablets can (and have) replaced laptops for some uses such as reading news, playing simplistic games and fighting boredom while on the toilet. But for literally anything that requires more detailed input than what glorified fingerpainting can achieve, you need more featureful computers with hardware keyboards and more precise pointing devices. Sure, you can add a keyboard and a mouse to a tablet, but then you've just made a laptop that is still hobbled by the simplistic tablet-designed apps.
I used to own an Android tablet. I currently own an iPad Air that was given to me. Both systems are absolutely horrible for anything more involved than pointing or swiping, and that goes for the apps as well. They're fine for reading news or forums or watching videos on Youtube, but everything else is terrible. The app I use the most on my iPad is Paper by FiftyThree. Fittingly enough for the tablet platform, it's a fingerpainting app.
People tend to laugh at visionaries when they are far ahead of their time. He made the proclamation 20 years ago, but it's only in the last couple of years that we have actually gotten there, through wider 3G/4G coverage and HTML5/WebGL/asm.js and so on.
SaaS and cloud services are full steam ahead, and I really do think subscription-based software will be even bigger in the future. Why do you think centralizing computing power is such a bad thing? It has giving us things like voice recognition on mobile devices (Siri/Google Voice/Cortana), even though the devices in question have nowhere near the processing power to do it themselves. By centralizing the heavy lifting, consumer devices can become sleeker, more featureful and have much better battery life, all of which are things the average consumer wants.
And why would Google want to offer alternative data vendors on their platform? You can install apps from Dropbox, Spideroak and various other cloud hosting services, but why would Google ever allow you to rip out Chrome and replace it with Firefox or another browser? Nevermind that Chrome literally is the OS, without it there is no ChromeOS.
I run straight Linux on my desktop (and 2003-vintage Thinkpad, for that matter), but looking at my general usage, roughly 70-80% of it happens in a browser. The rest includes watching movies, listening to music, word processing, chatting and email, the usual stuff. For mobile usage, it skews even further towards the browser.
A Chromebook will do all of that and boot to a browser in less than 10 seconds and have an all-day battery life and be super easy to maintain (no package conflicts!). Sometimes, you just want something that works without having to fiddle around with it.
I'll never give up my full-size desktop with the ~5TB storage, big monitor and great sound system, so a Chromebox as a desktop replacement is probably not for me, on that front I'm leaning more towards an Intel NUC or other small form factor PC as my eventual upgrade path, with a beefy NAS for storage. But for normal tasks while I'm on the road, a Chromebook is an easy choice.
(Plus, it's just a matter of time before the bootloaders are completely cracked open so you can install your favorite full-size Linux distro on a Chromebook).
You really sound like you have a bunch of Samsung stock, or maybe you're on Samsung's payroll, because no right-thinking individual can love Samsung that much. I have Samsung smartphones (S3 Mini and S4 Mini), and some of my family and colleagues have them too. The default interface TouchWiz is absolute garbage. Samsung insists on doing everything their own way, and they just end up breaking stuff. That's why my own S4 Mini has Cyanogenmod on it, which is much better, but still suffers from the limitations of an OS and applications primarily made for simplistic touch interfaces. It's fine for a phone or if a tablet satisfies your limited needs, but it completely breaks down for any sort of moderately-advanced use case.
And no, phones/tablets/phablets are not "the new style of laptop", they will never replace the laptop form factor. They may displace it slightly for simplistic use cases, but for anything even moderately advanced, the laptop (and desktop) is king. You could say that you're getting closer if you add a physical keyboard to your tablet, but then you've just recreated the physical layout of a laptop, while still being constrained by simplistic apps.
ChromeOS is not "Windows 7 with fewer apps", it's a fulfillment of the proclamation made by Marc Andreessen (head of Netscape at the time): "The browser will be the operating system". Even 3D graphics and games now run great within the browser, thanks to WebGL and asm.js. For instance, I haven't fired up Libreoffice in years, I use Google Docs instead. In ChromeOS, you can do literally everything that you can do in a Chrome browser on your fully-featured desktop. You can't do that with Android. And now ChromeOS (and desktop Chrome) will be running Android apps soon, as well. There's going to be a convergence, where the OS you run doesn't really matter in relation to what apps you can run, but the input system you're using determines which tasks are going to be feasible on any given type of device.
By "full support", you probably mean "unsupported extensions that Samsung has piled their own hacks onto". It is not a standardized solution at all, and it requires apps to be specifically written to make use of it.
Chrome OS seems to be selling quite well (refer to the oft-repeated "best selling laptop type on Amazon" etc.), to people who just want a straightforward web browsing device and to schools. It's true that right now ChromeOS only runs a handful of Android apps, but the plan is for full Android compatibility. Please explain how ChromeOS is not "a full OS". Sure, it's locked down by default, but so is Android. You have to jump through basically the same hoops to get root access, and literally everything Android can do, ChromeOS can do as well or better.
In my case, I want a device that will primarily let me use a browser, mail and a couple of other minor things like some games to waste some time. I want it to have great battery life and a physical keyboard. I also don't want to have to drag my fingers all over the screen to use it, leaving greasy fingerprints everywhere. I've had a tablet before, and I don't want another one.
I know there are Android-based laptops out there, but they're just not a very good option. The browsing experience alone is severely limited on Android compared to ChromeOS. There's no support for plugins on Android Chrome, and there are very few for Android Firefox. Not to mention that every single app is designed for touch input, with big fat buttons and super-simplified interfaces.
There's also the inexplicable lack of a native Google Drive client for Linux. Google has been promising it for several years, but it's still not here.
They're doing that now. Android apps are slowly trickling into the Chrome app store. They started out with Vine and Evernote and a couple of others, but the goal is to have every Android app run on Chrome as well.
It's been reported as a bug multiple times and closed, on the basis that they would rather load all tabs on startup than having the user wait for each tab individually. It's really a tossup between two non-ideal solutions. Last I heard, they're trying to optimize page loading to lessen the impact of loading a bunch of tabs simultaneously.
If I may ask, why are you loading a bunch of tabs on startup? I assume these are the same tabs every time, and that you're actually going to use these tabs actively as soon as they're loaded? In that case, I think loading them is a good idea, then they'll be ready for you.
On the other hand, if you're just keeping a bunch of pages open every single session because you'll want to go back to them at some point, why not just save them as bookmarks instead? That's what I realized I really should do instead of having 10-15 tabs that opened every time I started my browser, just for the purpose of going back to them at some vague point in the future.
Also, install ScriptSafe to block needless javascripting. Then go to chrome://chrome/settings/content and set plugins to "click to play". Pages will load much quicker :-)
That's good, because Google doesn't do that.
Do you really honestly think that Google would want to sell out parts of their massive goldmine of data they've assembled? Of course they want to keep it to themselves, why give away the major advantage they have over competitors?
Absolutely, I was in the same camp of considering a Chromebook, but removal of extFS support could have made it a lot harder to work smoothly together with my Linux desktop. I'm glad the devs listen to the feedback they get and are willing to go back on their previous decisions if they prove hugely unpopular with the users.
Now, all I have to do is wait for the 64-bit Tegra K1 "Denver" Chromebooks to hit the market.