For those who don't know, Google let out some information about Chrome OS yesterday. It's their take on a computer operating system. Let's talk about it!

The basic idea, if I understand it correctly, is that people spend so much time doing so much stuff in a web browser, why not basically just make the OS so stripped down that it consists mostly of a web browser? Instead of a desktop email client, use Gmail in a browser. Instead of Excel and Word, use Google Docs in a browser. Instead of AIM, use Gmail chat in a browser. Cloud computing to the max. And before I forget to mention it, the intended use for Chrome OS is netbooks--although it can of course work on any computer.

Let it first be said that I consider this to be an interesting take on things which isn't entirely without merit. I feel that, if technology continues to improve as it has been in past decades, it's entirely possible that we'll be carrying around things similar in appearance to Star Trek PADDs some day. A thin touchscreen display dominating the device and some wireless hardware to connect you to a system which does storage and computations could totally work with the right network, storage and processing infrastructure. However, that is not the state of things, nor will it be until the end of the next decade, at the earliest.

Allow me to list off the immediately perceived benefits and downsides of this method of computing, as things are in 2009:
Good stuff
* No need to pay for the OS, save $30-130
* OS is lightweight, startup is fast and system ages better
* Documents and content are backed up on the 'net, and can be easily shared
Bad stuff
* Net access--what happens if you don't have it?
* Bandwidth--even a nice 10+ Mbit connection will slow your file access by a factor of 50
* Storage--what do you do with all your files?
* Performance--what if you need to do something like an image render, making a home movie, or play a game?

Let's tackle the good stuff first. Not having to pay for an OS is a big win for light users, no getting around that. And the OS will be less bloated than Windows and OS X I'm sure, with faster startup. Why is that, though? Because Google trimmed away a lot of the stuff that makes computers powerful. They're versatile machines which handle lots of local processes, provide fast access to terabytes of local files, and allow for GPU acceleration for fun (games) and work (image editing, etc). When you trim that away so you have a glorified web browser, well, you lose that stuff. The implications of which I'll get to later. And startup is faster? That strikes me as almost completely irrelevant in 2009. Both PCs and Macs are able to go to sleep and wake back up within seconds, faster than Chrome OS will boot, and letting you get back to what you were doing. Stop shutting your computers down all the time and put them to sleep, problem solved. Finally, being able to share your documents is definitely good, but that comes with some limitations I'll also get to very soon.

So, the problems with this approach. The things which make me squirm in my chair and be glad that I'm currently using Windows.

Net access. It's great when you have it. At the apartment, with a land line connected to our wireless network that gives reliable download rates of 1MB/sec and up, browsing the web is a reasonably smooth experience. Of course, that's not always the case. In the past 12 months I've been in several buildings on my former college campus, several airplanes, several airplane terminals, several conventions, and other assorted locations which either: have patchy/slow free wireless, charge for wireless, have no wireless at all but good cell reception, have shitty cell reception, or have no cell reception at all. It is at these times, when I can't check FA or chat or even catch up on the news, that I am more glad than ever that I have movies and music and games and text on my local machine. Simply stated, unless you've got a system which makes heavy use of offline caching, you're going to have your computing experience interrupted by net availability. It takes the occasional and easily remedied problem of "why is this thing going slowly" and replaces it with rather frustrating and un-fixable issue of "where is my reception".

Bandwidth. On a good day with a good connection, it's not unreasonable to expect 1-2 MB/sec download and 200-300 KB/sec upload from a home wireless network. If you're on a shared/public/802.11g/cellular connection, expect to get as little as a tenth of that. Ever wait for your computer to do something and you can see one of the lights blinking like crazy, maybe it's vibrating more than usual or you can hear a sort of humming/clicking-noise? That's the hard drive trying to load and save files, and it's a very common bottleneck for performance. A standard hard drive might get 60 MB/sec transfer and be able to move to a random file in .02 seconds. A good 'net connection will be closer to 2 MB/sec transfer and relay and retrieve information in closer to .1 seconds. And a cell connection can be several times slower still. So all that waiting you have to put up with? It's not going to get any better. On a good connection, downloading something like a full-size photo can be pretty quick, you just wait a second or two. Uploading it can take 5 times longer, and of course if you're going to have files and such to download, you have to upload it there in the first place (I'm not talking general web browsing, rather using the web to store personal files, etc). Switch to a less optimal connection and suddenly that 5-10 second upload time is the expected download time, and your upload time starts to creep up towards a minute. So while Chrome OS might do a cold restart 40 seconds faster than your desktop, you're going to chew through those 40 seconds gained pretty damn fast when you actually try to, you know, look at something other than flat text. To put it in terms which are easier to grasp... time to copy 1 GB of new photos from your camera to your laptop: 30-60 seconds. Time to copy 1 GB of new photos from your camera to the 'net with 100 KB/sec upload: nearly 3 hours.

Storage. Ignoring the fact that it might take you half the day to get your vacation photos uploaded to your online photo gallery even with a fully automated transfer, where do you expect to store them all? You can keep a limited number of them on hand at all times by making them into Gmail attachments, but they're limited in size and emailing things to yourself feels silly. You really want to use some sort of actual online image gallery. Google's offering, Picasa, only gets you 1 GB for free--and like YouTube, they gain rights to reproduce anything you submit to it, even if you don't make it public. Pretty sure they don't smile on porn in those galleries either. And they're just image galleries! And just for images you own! What if you've got a collection of your favorite... I dunno, LOLcat pictures. Or say you've got 5 GB of home videos, or 15 GB of music, or anything really--what do you do with it? Where do you put it? You're going to end up paying for it somehow, whether it's by dodging ads every time you want to listen to a song you put online, or letting Google feed you ads for gay cruises when picks up on tags for some pictures you were sharing, or by you flat-out paying for the service.

So you're going to have less storage than if you went with a regular OS and kept your files on the computer, it's going to be ten times slower to access it, and you're going to pay a lot more for it in all likelihood... assuming, of course, that you've got 'net access when you want it. The example of watching a movie on a flight is a prime example of all of these things: the movie occupies several gigabytes which is a small fraction of a dollar to keep indefinitely on your computer but much more online, it will take a day to upload it and if you've got a good connection you'll be able to stream it in real time, but you're on a PLANE so chances are you have no connection whatsoever.

And finally, Performance. Some things can be done for fairly cheaply online--Gmail, Facebook, and FurAffinity are all services which do some behind-the-scenes computation to spit out the data your browser shows you personally. For these services, the computations are so slight that the occasional advertisement view generates enough revenue that the service usually pays for itself. Not everything is that way. World of Warcraft charges monthly fees (in theory) to pay for their server costs, because they need to run lots of systems 24/7 to ensure players can quest together. Of course, a game like World of Warcraft wouldn't run on Chrome OS because Chrome is all about running things in the browser, which WoW certainly won't do. The best you're going to get with an OS like that are flash games, and even though my system can churn through the newest games with relative ease it absolutely cowers at full-screen flash animations and games with the settings turned all the way up. So to restate, the problem here is that the idea of doing all the work in the browser means that performance-demanding tasks have to be done there as well--and I think that companies will not be eager to rewrite programs to do all the heavy lifting on their end of things. Hey, it's either that or write every program in Flash. Have I told you about how abysmal interactive Flash performance is on real computers, to say nothing of netbooks?

When you think about it, there's a smooth continuity of computer distributed...ness... from the pre-WWW era Windows box to the Google Chrome OS. On the one side, everything is kept and done locally, with high performance but no connectivity. On the other side, everything is kept and done remotely, with low performance but high connectivity. Right now we're in a happy medium, I like to think. We watch YouTube videos from a web server through a web browser, and we listen to local music on a local media player (or edit local files in a local instance of Photoshop). There are programs which will upload your files to the web for backup purposes, Gmail Offline will download your email from the web for when you lose your connection, etc... all sorts of programs and tools help to bridge the gap between web servers and your computer, making sure you have the local speed and reliability combined with web connectivity. This is a good area to drift around and explore in.

Some might argue that I'm missing the point. Chrome OS isn't aimed at replacing Windows for gamers, or graphic artists, or network administrators. It's a netbook OS which seeks to decentralize data from your computer, and speed things up. As things are for the forseeable future, the former makes a system potentially worthless for all tasks if connectivity slows down or is interrupted, as well as flying in the face of the second by replacing optimized code running directly on the hardware with Javascript and Flash running in a browser. It's already possible to use Microsoft Office to compose a document on your system when you're offline, and use Google Docs (complete with its weak formatting tools and slower response time) when you're online. Opting for Chrome OS robs you of the ability to do the offline work, and potentially gives you worse performance, just so you can shave half a minute off your unnecessary start-up time.

I'm going to play Devil's advocate here for a moment. Google's whole argument for making Chrome the basis of the OS is that people mostly use computers these days to do things that are online, and online means in the browser, so why not just make everything you do live in the browser somehow? Well, maybe what they need to do is make 'online' NOT equate to something in a standard tabbed browser window. Make a browser window that doesn't look like a web browser, and let me navigate it to a site and run it in a way that looks like a local program. Oh wait, Chrome already does that. And Mozilla's Prism aims to do the same. They put it better than I could: "Unfortunately the web browser, which was originally designed for reading documents, is not an ideal environment for running applications. It is frustrating and time-consuming to wade through a mass of browser windows and tabs just to find your email client. Unstable applications can slow down or crash your entire browser. And many of the conveniences offered by modern operating systems are unavailable to web apps running in the browser." Modern desktop operating systems have window management tools, mini-apps, and high-performance applications running natively on the hardware--these things have been refined and redesigned for over two decades. It feels pretty damn foolish to discard them just because Google's logical follow-up for "People spend a lot of time in the web browser" is "let's eliminate everything except the web browser".