Today, Google finally announced Chrome OS and showed it off a bit. It’s just as it was rumored to be and just as it sounds: the Chrome web browser basically is the OS. You turn on the computer and you get the browser, that’s it. All you can use are webapps. The idea is that most people spend 95% of their computing time using webapps and surfing anyway, so why not focus on that experience and streamline it. In the process, it aims to nix a lot of the issues that users have with their computers—a Chrome OS device will have a lot less going on under the hood than a traditional PC, so it’ll boot up faster and be immune to malware (since you can’t install ANYTHING on it, benign or malicious). Trouble is, the world isn’t quite ready to go webapps-only just yet. Even Google admitted during the press conference that they expect people who buy a Chrome OS netbook to keep their standard desktop or laptop system around for the things they can’t do on the web yet (or don’t want to). But honestly, I don’t think I would even install Chrome OS on my netbook. Looking at my boxen, this is a quick list of everything that would prevent me from switching from Windows to Chrome:
- Most critically, a Chrome OS box obviously won’t be able to be joined to a Windows domain. Whether I log on to my desktop or my netbook, I need to have access to my documents, and if I change a file on one it needs to be synced so that I’ll see the change on the other. Obviously logging onto the domain with a roaming profile accomplishes this; for Chrome, there would have to be a file-syncing service like Dropbox that works under Chrome without installing anything.
- Desktop apps that just aren’t replaceable yet. A few examples:
- Photoshop. Granted, I only use this on my desktop because it would be unusable on a netbook anyway. Still, Photoshop is a beast of a program and it would be impossible for Adobe to create a web version with anywhere near the same functionality. (There is a “Photoshop” webapp but it’s nothing like the actual Photoshop CS4 software.) Javascript performance is going to have to get faster by an enormous factor before you could ever think of implementing many of PS’s features in the browser. Not to mention the colossal size of the high-DPI, hundreds-of-layers PSDs that professionals work with. I think this will forever remain an app for beefier Mac & Windows PCs.
- Skype. A good videocalling webapp that meets or beats Skype’s ease-of-use and functionality probably could be done, but nobody’s done it yet. Google did just buy a VoIP company recently so maybe they’re working on it.
- Microsoft Office. It’s still the de facto standard, and neither Google Docs nor Microsoft’s online Office suite can touch it yet. This one will go down fairly quickly though. Google is claiming outright that Docs will catch up next year (which, not coincidentally I think, is also when they expect to release Chrome OS).
- KeePass (or insert your favorite password manager here). There are password manager webapps, but to be honest, I still don’t trust this data to the cloud. I have more than just passwords for websites in my KeePass database.
- Games. Goes without saying, but they won’t ever run on Chrome OS and there’s no intention for Chrome OS to be used for gaming. This is also a primary reason why I’ll never switch to Mac or Linux. As long as I’m a gamer, I’ll be at least dual-booting Windows on at least one of my machines. (And if you think I want to go through the hassle of rebooting just to launch a game, you’re crazy.)
If Chrome OS is successful, it’ll be successful in pushing webapps forward to fill in a lot of these gaps and provide the features and tools that are missing so far. If that happens, and I would love to see it because this is actually the area I’m looking to get into with my degree, I can certainly see myself running Chrome OS on a netbook in the future. But we’re not there yet.
Netflix notified me today that my disc to activate PS3 streaming is in the mail. I was hoping Netflix wouldn’t be an Xbox-exclusive feature among the consoles. It’s nice to see them expand support. How long will it be now before basically every new HDTV, BD/DVD player, game console, or video device of any kind comes with Netflix built-in? I was a subscriber and a big fan of Netflix before they had streaming service at all, and now I’m just waiting for the day that I can turn off disc shipments altogether because everything is available on Instant Play.
