jr conlin's ink stained banana

i've run Chrome. It's a nice browser. i keep it in a folder next to Safari and Opera for when i test pages. i'm certain that a lot of folks love it. i don't find it useful or compelling enough to switch over to. For me, at least, it's a bit like getting into an economy car that has a speedometer on the dashboard and a slew of idiot lights. Some people like that. Some folks like Segways too.

Of course, there's also the fact that Google loves to collect information about you so that they can make money off of it. Of course, this is also the stated goal of credit card agencies that do all kinds of clever things like potentially consider you a risk because you bought a friend a drink at a particular bar, so i'm not really all that inclined to offer the folks that bought doubleclick more info about myself.

Google wants you to do thing on the web. That means that all that's needed from any OS is

• A way to host TCP/IP
• A driver for the Network connect device (most probably wireless)
• Reasonable disk/memory access
• A way to run a browser

And, well, that's about it. Everything else would be done in "the cloud". Hell, you could probably forgo the local disk options entirely and have the system boot from the network. None of this is new, by the way. Unix systems have had this for decades with remote terminals and X Clients. Microsoft has even had a go at it with their Terminal Services. Google has stated that they're targeting low end, underpowered devices as is, so don't expect to be running TF2 on it. In effect, they're making their own version of Crunchpads.

So, will this amazing "OS" set the world on fire? Possibly. Apple has proven that a minimal, portable web browser is fairly compelling. Palm's PreOS is proving that you can build some reasonably impressive mobile apps with Javascript. Merging the two isn't that much of a trick.

Of course, i tend to like having computers that don't need a full connection all the time in order to work.

The touch isn't a total brick when i don't have a network connection, but i dare say it's close to useless in comparison to when i do. Granted, Apple isn't a "web company" so i would have been terribly surprised to find out if it was. Still, with phone (and phone like) devices becoming more capable, why would you want to carry around a device that's the size of a pad of paper and not be a full laptop? Isn't that a bit like driving around with a segway in the trunk, "just in case"?

i'm sure i'll be wrong about this too, but honestly, i don't really see this OS setting the world on fire quite yet. For that matter, i don't really see it solving any problem i have. Potentially creating a few, sure, but there's no pressing urgency in my life for something like this.

Kinda like how i can live quite happily without a Segway.