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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

Most of ChromeOS's safety "features" come at the expense of not being able to do anything; ChromeOS can't run arbitrary malicious code because it can't really run ANY arbitrary code. Yes, yes, Emscripten, the birth and death of Javascript, etc. -- the fact is that security through uselessness isn't a recipe for adoption.

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ChromeOS can do most of the tasks that an everyday Internet user might want. There are lots of people who are content with its restrictions. It's far from useless.

The update system on Chrome is wonderful, in that it just happens. No strange dialog boxes, popup messages or confusing options for the computer-illiterate. It just goes ahead and does it. A power user might not like that, but it is a great system for a huge userbase.

How many insecure ChromeOS devices are there out there? Very few, I'd expect. Not many other operating systems can claim this.

Why doesn't anyone buy them then?

In the last couple years at least, Chromebooks have often topped Amazon best-sellers. Technically, a lot of people buy them. It's just that compared to mobile devices, laptops as a whole are a small category. Admittedly, most Chromebooks are bought because they are inexpensive (what virtually no one buys is Chromebook Pixel, which I have never seen outside Google except the ones folks got for free at I/O).

I suspect that's a factor of there being very few models. A Windows laptop that sells millions is probably available in 20 versions, each of which is counted separately. Try searching for the current Amazon.com best seller in laptops, the Toshiba Satellite C55.

That is an US phenomenon. The only place I saw them in Europe was garage/discount sales trying to get rid of them.

They're very popular in education (http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2015/05/sixty_...). Mainly because they are inexpensive, a lot more versatile and better suited than iPads, the previous hype in education (see for instance the LA iPad debacle http://www.wired.com/2015/05/los-angeles-edtech/). Also, many schools are already using Google services: Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and now Google Classroom is becoming huge.

Not that I agree with their use in education, but "a lot more versatile"? I can't think of anything that a chromebook can do that the iPad can't but I can vice versa. The only advantage I see to a chromebook is a built-in keyboard (and price)

Apparently (I don't work in that space) it's very useful to system administrators that Chromebooks are essentially stateless and fungible.

A built-in keyboard is huge for the classroom. Chromebooks in classrooms end up being used largely for written work (typing long essays, creating presentations, etc.) that an iPad is less amenable to than a laptop.

iPads can use external keyboards, though.

Another thing to break or to lose, and to charge, and it adds to the cost. A $200 chromebook blows away a $600 ipad+keyboard combo for majority of education purposes. Google also has much better deployment & operations for devices & apps.

Source: I know lots of people who deploy and manage these in schools.

I have a 150$ chrome book and it fucking rocks. Does everything I need to do on the web, and I can do javascript/webgl dev on the road.. battery lasts FORever... really amazing machines.

I made a computer illiterate friend get one because I was sick of doing tech support for his windows Lappie and he loves it, and has had zero probs with it.. the only time he's called me with a problem with it was when he was trying to some fucking exe to win a free ipod. CHROME os rocks.

What application(s) do you use for development on the Chromebook?

This is all you need: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

For me? SSH and a VPS. I don't need whatever random crap I decide to `wget && tar x && ./configure` to have any risk of infecting my browser session. And I can keep my VPS up-to-date just by getting a new one from The Cloud every so often, and it comes out way cheaper than buying a beefy developer laptop periodically. I've had the same, low-end Chromebook for almost two years now and barely feel any need to upgrade it.

I did this for a while, except my thin client was an X1 Carbon (!)

Have you calculated how much it's costing you?

I ended up scripting up a way to find the cheapest Spot Instance price from Amazon for whatever workload I needed - if I was doing builds I wanted the 8 core machines (c4.2xlarge?). They're ~11c an hour as a Spot Instance, although it's 3x the amount for a Windows instance, and I'd be pushed out of the market if everyone started doing this.

I think I was averaging a couple of dollars a day, so I suppose it comes out in favour of using AWS all the time.

So my current VPS is a non-virtual Kimsufi box for which I'm paying $28 (USD)/month, i.e., $336/year. I'm also paying about $10/month more for a cell phone plan with enough mobile data, which brings that to $456/year. An equivalently-specced laptop that is comfortable enough to use (lightweight, cool, not going to break on me, etc.) would cost me about 2-3 times that amount, and I'd want to replace it at least that often.

(Also if I had a powerful local laptop, I couldn't tell it to do a build, close the lid, and get on the subway without my backpack catching fire. Nor could I have it provide IPv6 to my apartment, host websites behind CloudFlare, provide shells to my friends, etc.)

If I wanted to put some more effort into it, I could certainly do a good fraction of my work (git clone, vi, IRC and email, etc.) on a micro instance. But even a couple of dollars a day would require me to be pretty careful to come out cheaper.

Sweet! Thanks for that information. Until my net connection becomes more reliable it's not really an option for me 24/7.

I think my costs would be a bit higher because Kimsufi/OVH/Hetzner are 300-400ms away from me, so the latency is a bit uncomfortable.

When I was in Canada, a Hetzner box was 200ms away and usable, but for ~$30 a month I only had a dual core box - a bit restrictive when doing large builds.

I might have a go at automating setting up a dev environment on AWS which can be torn down when not in use.

You are not going to sell in third world if your product completely depend on market.and thired world is where you can beat windows with being CHEAPER.and second fact nobody has internet like this in third world.Chromebooks are excellent product with Google fiber.but outside of that,not really(for me as someone lives in thired world country).because even with spending 90$/mounth for internet.my internet is nowhere near to run everything on the web.

Third world? Hell, we're having enough connectivity problems in the first world. Costs aside, a VPS is useless if your ISP connects your entire state with only one fibre link which can be felled by a once-every-few-years storm (UPC Austria and Carinthia, btw.).

I'm not much of an Amazon cloud user, but for compiling stuff like new Linux kernels, or big c++ projects (firefox, chrome) - having instant speed for almost nothing sounds good.

Could you share a couple of lines on how you would set that up? Spin up an upstream-provided basic AMI (eg: RedHat/Ubunut/Debian) - and run a few commands under screen via ssh - and then shut it down?

How can you seriously answer "SSH and VPS" as apps for development ON the Chrombook? They run on there, but you are not doing development on the machine.

It's like driving a little remote control car to the shops and claiming that you went. You didn't.

I could walk into a library and use a terminal there to type code in, but I'm not doing development on that machine - it's just a dumb terminal.

Now I understand the fact that you can remotely connect somewhere else to do work, but the advent of the microcomputer has meant that you shouldn't need to do that. Power usage for the earth will not be great if everyone runs a device that needs power locally, over a network system that needs powered routers, to a computer remotely that needs power just so you can type code in.

That really doesn't make sense.

I don't think the math works out the way you think it does. If 10 people share a 1000 watt server, that's better than each of them running a 300 watt pc.

I agree that in the context of this (sub)thread, it's a bit odd to claim that chromebooks are decent developer workstations, when what's meant is that they're decent dumb terminals. I'd still like to run my code on my dumb terminal - but I think it makes perfect sense to work like that - have something dumb and wireless for human interaction, and data/processing on a dedicated piece of kit. Be that a low power intel cpu and ssd in a small box behind the tv, or something in a rack somewhere.

You could install crouton without a DE and use the built-in shell to do whatever you wanted if you had a need to do development work and wanted to use ChromeOS without a full graphical Ubuntu install. You would have access to apt and vim.

> Now I understand the fact that you can remotely connect somewhere else to do work, but the advent of the microcomputer has meant that you shouldn't need to do that.

And the advent of dynamic libraries has meant we shouldn't need Docker, but, well, that's how it is. It's true that in an ideal world we shouldn't need such a mechanism, but in practice this system works very well for me, and the other ones have been frustrating.

I need a working internet connection anyway to do work: I need everything from software updates to GitHub to IM with coworkers to Google and StackOverflow. And the remote machine shouldn't need any more power than my local one. So my added power consumption is just that of my Chromebook, which is about 10 W.

I admit freely that I am not fulfilling the definition of "development on the Chromebook" in a strict sense, but it is certainly a serious answer for how I develop on my Chromebook.

Got my mother-in-law one for the same reasons. She loves it.

I can't reply to ohitsdom (below), but Chromebooks have a hardware switch for "developer mode" which let you run a command line.

There's also in-browser VPNing.

Amazon's best-selling laptop is currently a chromebook.

I think most of what that means is that Amazon isn't a first-party seller of MacBooks. (You can buy MacBooks on Amazon but I believe those are all third-party sellers.)

And other laptop companies release tons of slightly differing models.

> ChromeOS can do most of the tasks that an everyday Internet user might want.

That's damning with faint praise, isn't it? It can, at this point, do MOST of what an everyday Internet user might want? It's that whole 80/20 thing that everyone thought would let somebody overthrow Microsoft Office -- 80% of users only use 20% of the features. Well that's true and all, but it's not the same 20% for everyone, and you only have to miss one feature to make a Chromebook an untenable alternative to a Windows machine. There was a brief window where Chromebooks were significantly cheaper than a comparable Windows laptop but Intel took the ARM threat seriously, Microsoft took the licensing seriously and now the base Chromebook price from a name manufacturer isn't significantly cheaper than the HP Stream or what have you. "Most" is not going to cut it now that the price advantage is gone.

> There are lots of people who are content with its restrictions.

This is really only true in that we live on a planet with many, many lots of people, and so you can find lots of people for which almost anything holds true if you funnel it down. ChromeOS market share is a rounding error at this point, and if there were any signs that this was turning around, Google apparently decided they weren't enough for them to continue.

Agreed. About a month and a half ago, my grandfather asked me for recommendations on a new computer. I asked him what he needed to do on his computer, and it was looking like a Chromebook (or in his case, more likely a Chromebox) would be perfect, until he mentioned that he runs Quicken. And my mother (an accountant) was emphatic that Quicken Online was no substitute.

Also in agreement. 1% of the use can make 99% of the difference.

And the worst part is that last 1% is different for 99% of people. ;)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

I don't know how old your grandfather is, but Chrome OS is a much better choice than Windows for an elderly person. The sheer power of Windows combined with the most malware of all OSes and unnecessarily frequent UI changes make Windows the very worst OS for the elderly. OS X is better than Windows in this regard, and iOS is better still. Chrome OS is just great for old folks and Chrome OS devices are extremely cost competitive (Chromebooks are cheaper!) with Apple devices.

But... it doesn't have Quicken. And he just said that his grandfather needs Quicken. I, uh, you didn't even address that part!

The comment to which I replied said Quicken Online was no substitute according to the mother. Maybe it's no substitute in sheer power, but still a passable substitute? The elderly benefit from giving up some power in exchange for less system maintenance.

Having an elderly family member struggle to stay up on Windows is super sad to watch and try to help with. I personally definitely wish that I had been more proactive migrating my grandfather to a more locked-down system when he was slightly younger and had a better capacity to adapt.

If the grandfather really is elderly, like older than 75 or 80, I would push in the direction of asking the question "Does he really need Quicken anyway, or maybe he's at a point where he could give up that responsibility, or compromise with Quicken Online?"

> still a passable substitute

I've never met anyone who said it was, so I doubt it. Stop being a blind advocate and realize that some people do need Windows because they need apps that only run on Windows.

It's a trade-off. In my grandpa's case, he would love now to give up Photoshop in exchange for freedom from a litany of Windows nuisances (viruses, registry issues, major UI changes - things many of us forget about that use OS X or Linux). Unfortunately, that ship has sailed; he's 93 now and while not necessarily senile, he has real trouble grokking the cloud and therefore Chrome OS is prohibitively confusing.

Interesting point. I switched to a Mac 10 years ago, and to this day the only software I still fire up a Windows virtual machine for is Quicken. (Quicken Australia never made a Mac version.)

ChromeOS is portable browser. And Google has shaped the eco-system to ensure that that is all 50% of the userbase needs. This is an achievement.

When I'm in a pessimistic mood, I can see a day where we return to $4000+ "developer" machines. I think Doctorow wrote about the war on General Purpose Computing. It turns out that developers and power users were casualties in the race to protect users from themselves.

It already happened. I cannot seriously buy a laptop under € 1000 for work.

The screen, keyboard, case and battery quality are a joke in most offerings, not to mention most lack dedicated GPUs or specific BIOS features.

But if you needed to (and had lots of patience…), you could get your whole development stack on a $250 notebook, because there's $250 notebooks with Windows, or where you can install Linux etc.

Granted, it's not as productive (trackpoint or riot!), but it works.

But with the increasing tivoization of computing? Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding? People in developing countries? Poor people in developed countries? Not everyone can afford a 1000€ price tag. Should these people really be excluded from everything that isn't mindless passive consumption?

> Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding?

The same way we learned since the late 70's on the home computers.

Installing some kind of application that allows coding.

The only difference being that BASIC or Forth were already builtin.

While maybe this won't always be the case, the current chromeOS structure allows for arbitrary code, you just have to enable a development mode. The process for doing that is well documented. I don't have a problem with a computer that comes restricted as long as there is a documented process for un-restricting it. Same reason I don't find SIP in OS X or Secure Boot a problem. Security features are good as long as they are configurable.

Configurability can be taken away easily.

Secure Boot is the best example for that:

• On Windows RT devices it always was mandatory and could not be disabled.

• On Windows 8 devices, manufacturers must give users an option to disable it.

• On Windows 10 devices, it is now in the manufacturer discretion whether it can be disabled or not.

The next step is obvious.

Right, that's a problem. I fully agree with you on that. I just think it's important that fight for the right thing. Secure Boot isn't the problem. In fact, most people probably should leave it on because it's a good security feature. It is absolutely critical that these features work for users and not against them though.

Funny you should mention Microsoft Windows. As I understand it, the phone OS is now unified with tablet and desktop - but you still can't run anything but windows on a windows phone. I don't expect them to offer up the driver source code (all though that would be nice) - but an open boot loader would be a start.

I suppose it's no surprise. It goes something like this: a) underwrite the device (not necessarily lose money on every sale, just lower the margins), b) introduce an app store, c) take a cut of every transaction.

As long as users and developers need your OS, your device - your appstore - you will make money.

I think it's just a matter of time for that trend of exclusively mobile/dumb devices to start reversing especially as phones/tablets increase in processing power. Canonical already showed us it is possible to run both Android and a full desktop OS on the Android kernel years ago[1], MS Surface tablets are basically laptops without a fixed hinge between the keyboard and screen.

I see at least one clear profit motive for the industry here, let's say you have a "Desktop enabled, smart" smartphone, you'll probably want to buy a dock, screen, keyboard, mouse, productivity software, etc.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_for_Android

Easy: Just build a PC! It's not hard and it can be dirt cheap. Look at this: http://choosemypc.net/build/?budget=400&oc=false&options=,os

That's what I was thinking. Off the top of my head (not 100% checking compatability, but with current Newegg prices), to replace my current machine, not counting the 24 inch 1080p monitor (which in my experience last a long time as long as a tornado doesn't throw rocks into them (really)) and keyboard, mouse, etc.:

  Supermicro XnSAE workstation motherboard: 215
  3.3GHz 4 core Xeon E3-1226 CPU w/HDMI out: 217
  32 GiB DDR3 1600 ECC Kingston memory: 240
  Low end 1/3 w/year for 5 years data center 80GB Intel SATA SSD: 100
  Seagate "enterprise" <550/TB/year 4 TB hard disk: 210

982 USD plus shipping plus whatever enclosure, power supply, high quality fans etc. you put into it, which ought not go over $200 new. E.g. after discovering a Lian-Li enclosure I love I bought 3 more and cycle through them.

Plus backup, however you do that (make sure critical stuff is offsite!). And, say, a man-week of your time to configure, order, build, install and configure Linux. The result will be very fast and rock solid (well, if put behind a good UPS) workstation class machine with a 5 year design life.

> Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding?

Simple enough; they'll code on tablets.

I'm actually currently working on a prototype for how a simple, useful development environment might look on a phone or tablet. It's a stack-based concatenative array language with a zoomable user interface. Instead of representing code as lines of text, it takes a more Smalltalk-like approach of a live environment. The benefit of being a concatenative language is that it naturally lends itself to a tree-like format where each word can be viewed and edited on a phone screen. Since semantically it's closer to a weird mashup of J and Perl(!), it can be concise (hopefully still readable) and the vector aspect makes drawing graphics pretty straightforward.

The downside, of course, is that it can be quite hard to reason in. Truthfully, I'm not really sure how to work around that—and I don't think most children will easily think in a function composition/matrix manipulation way. That said, I'd like to find something since I'm fairly sold on the idea that tacit programming with arrays is key to making coding on a tablet work (I think it's fairly clear that imperative or even conventional function languages would be a royal pain to use in such an environment). Maybe something Lisp-like where the user zooms around the AST would be an alternative.

> Poor people in developed countries?

Much cheaper phones and tablets are already vastly more popular than laptops or desktops among poor people. The solution is to move coding forward on mobile, not simply keep rather trashy cheap laptops around.

> Since semantically it's closer to a weird mashup of J and Perl(!), it can be concise (hopefully still readable)

I see you've chosen well known readable languages as your inspiration ;)

> Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding?

There's plenty of free, on-device code editor, compiler/interpreter, etc. apps for Android, including ones that will allow you to run code in the app, or build, package, and install (given that you've enable non-Store installation) Android apps right on the device.

I think there is a difference in not wanting to buy a cheap laptop because of build/hardware quality, and not being able to buy a cheap laptop because it won't let you run arbitrary code. One's a choice you make because you have the money to afford a nicer laptop. The other makes it even harder for the less fortunate to understand computers.

We are just going back to the whole packaged solution of the home computers in the 80's and 90's.

I and many others did learn computing on those systems, so apparently it isn't a show stopper to learn.

How is a locked down tablet/laptop in any way similar to a computer with a built-in compiler/interpreter and a full hw schematic available in the manual?

Not all of them were like that.

I don't remember getting any compiler or interpreter for Amiga, Atari or Apple Mac. You had to pay for them and the schematics were part of the OS SDK, also commercial.

Also going besides the ROM BASIC or Forth meant buying a compiler/interpreter.

The app stores are full of them, just pick one.

I know the Amiga manuals (Amiga 2000) was very well documented, a friend fixed ours by measuring the various documented points on the main board, finding a poorly soldered component or fried transistor (I forget the details).

AFAIK Arexx was part of Worbench? But yes, you did need to get a compiler/interpreter for that. I thought you were talking about stuff like the C64 generation of computers.

I remember there were GNU tools available for the Amiga, and some magazines came with various development tools -- eg: Blitz Basic. But most were certainly commercial (including Blitz Basic) - but one must consider that even with aminet - there was nothing like the essentially free distribution of today (eg: push to github).

According to this site, Amiga Basic was actually bundled with the machine (note-section: "bundled basic language interpreter (free with machine)"):

http://www.classicamiga.com/content/view/5044/175/

> The app stores are full of them, just pick one.

Did Apple change their policy of allowing development tools? They certainly don't allow the creation of apps on the ipad/iphone as far as I know?

> Did Apple change their policy of allowing development tools? They certainly don't allow the creation of apps on the ipad/iphone as far as I know?

A few of the best ways to learn coding on the move

Codea

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codea/id439571171?mt=8

Pythonista

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pythonista/id528579881?mt=8

GLSL Studio

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glsl-studio/id481421644?mt=8

Lisping

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lisping/id512138518?mt=8

There are plenty more, one just needs to search for them.

Also they are pretty cheap compared to what I used to pay for, back in those days.

> > There are lots of people who are content with its restrictions.

Much of the use of ChromeOS and ChromeBooks is in education (where they compete with Macs and iPads), where the buyers are not the users, and the restrictions are actually part of the appeal. It's a decent niche I guess, it's just that but when I see some of the newer Chromebooks with Core-i5 processors, I can't but feel it's a waste of horsepower.

What you're saying flies in the face of the growing evidence that many people are happy with a computing device (phone, tablet) that can't do everything, but can do a lot.

I bought my mom a Chromebook and she loves it. I think the group of users who are willing and able to do all their computing tasks inside a browser window is larger than you think.

Well there is a huge oversight in the fact that enabling developer mode options (namely for crouton- running ubuntu in parallel) completely nixes any promise of security. I love ChromeOS, and I agree with all the above sentiments, but I wish they had better support for securely running virtual Linux distros!

> ChromeOS can do most of the tasks that an everyday Internet user might want.

Sure, if you say so it must be true.

> How many insecure ChromeOS devices are there out there?

How many ChromeOS devices in absolute numbers are out there and what is the target audience of 200$ laptops?

If I were a hacker, I would certainly not target this platform.

Nobody I know kept their chromebook as their main computer for very long because it wasn't able to do the things they wanted to do with their computer. The only people I know who have kept using it wiped it and installed Ubuntu.

Representative sample concerns aside... I've had one for 2 years and am still very actively using it and considering chromeboxes to replace aging PCs at my place and for some of my relatives (come being on the tech illiterate side of the spectrum, while others ran IT departments in their days). I use it for my kids (3 and 6 yo at the moment) and they use it way more than the tablets (not useful enough for them) or the "real" PCs (yet too unapproachable for them without supervision except for basic workflows).

It's not my "main" computer though, but that was never the problem raised in this thread. The fact is, chromebooks and Chrom{e,ium}OS are very decent platforms for all kinds of users, and they are indeed pretty safe to run. And I often do as others said: I ssh from the chromebook to my other PCs in other rooms, or remote servers, etc...

It's also a great device when travelling if you have a 4G phone providing connectivity or you stop in hotels or conferences with WiFi (I wonder if there's been attempts to bring one to a DefCon or pwn conference to see how it holds... haven't checked).

Sure I find that it hads plenty of shortcomings. But most of them are stuff that are shortcomings for me, professional CS/IT dev/tester/consultant/trainer/teacher/etc... Lots of other user groups will also probably fine shortcomings (like the "elderly" person mentioned requiring Quicken), but it doesn't mean you can't work around the issue (substitute it, use quicken from another machine, etc...).

It surely isn't all-purpose or perfect, but it's still great.

I wholeheartedly agree that I'd be deeply sad to see it sank, way more than I'd have been to see it merged the other way around.

That being said, as recently Android Apps were starting to be available on ChromeOS via the Chrome Web Store and worked decently for the most part, I'm curious to see what the actual integration/folding will be. Because it may be largely marketing-oriented to make Android the prominent part (or just the prominent brand) as it's way more popular in terms of user and device share (billions vs probably a few millions, if even that).

EDIT: And Pichai's quote does not worry me too much until I see something happening: "mobile as a computing paradigm is eventually going to blend with what we think of as desktop today."

In fact, the article seems mostly unsubstantiated, so as long as I don't see an announcement from Google I think I'm not letting go of my chromebook and ChromeOS. :)

power users just run chrooted linux on it and boom, fully functioning $200 computer

Or you could just buy a fully functioning $200 computer.

The hardware of $200 non-ChromeOS computers is worse; and with ChromeOS you were sure it ran Linux properly.

There is not a huge gap in difference, in terms of HW quality between a Chromebook and a normal cheap laptop (in my experience). Can you provide an example ?

I planned to buy a Chromebook a while ago and do exactly as the parent suggested, but got to the conclusion that it's just not worth the hassle (also, Chromebooks tend to have minimal storage, which is definitely not ideal in a normal laptop).

In general, Chrome OS or not, the HW (touchpad, screen and keyboard even more than raw power) in a 200$ laptop is BAD.

How about the Ctrl and Alt keys, minus windows key? Fucking beautiful for emacs users. This story makes me sad. :(

The Toshiba Chromebook 2 ( http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-CB35-B3340-Chromebook-Celeron-... ) has a great 1080p IPS screen, 9 hours of battery life, and, from what I can remember when I played with it, a good keyboard and trackpad along with decent build quality, for $290. It's got a decent Bay Trail 8W Celeron processor, and 4gb RAM (there are also models with faster processors). There are Windows laptops around that price range also, but AFAIK none with that combination of hardware quality and specs.

As a developer, an unjailbroken Chromebook is my preferred local terminal, because all my work involves SSHing to servers anyway. The Secure Shell and Mosh apps work great (and I even use the Mosh app in Chrome on "real" OSes, because it's simpler).

Before Chrome OS, I ran homegrown minimal Linux installations with a separate user account to run Firefox. It was way too much overhead for me to be excited about maintaining, and paying $200 for a secure architecture and security updates by the most competent people in the industry was super attractive. I can do servers very well; I don't also need to do desktops, let alone my personal desktop.

You should try Qubes. It's not very hard to use.

Thanks for the heads-up, hadn't heard to Qubes before.

You mean as a server-side developer...

Not really; my previous job was maintaining a commercial Linux-based desktop. For that one I had a powerful local machine so I could run some desktops in virtualization; I hardly wanted to use my own machine as a guinea pig, because I needed that machine for actually getting work done. I did in fact have a desktop Linux machine on my desk, but in practice I just ran shells and Firefox on it, and half the time I was connected to my screen remotely.

A CrOS-like OS with the ability to run VMs would be pretty great. (And yes, I should check out Qubes.)

There's also pnacl, not to mention the fact that a LOT of what people actually do online is all done/doable in the browser alone. A modern browser is the most full-featured application platform that has ever existed in terms of what comes "in the box".

I'm all for allowing native applications a place to run, however that doesn't mean that ChromeOS was not able to do anything... both my parents and grandparents are all on ChromeOS laptops now... why? It's all they need, secure and I haven't had to remotely clear out any malware in over a year.

A modern browser is the most full-featured application platform that has ever existed in terms of what comes "in the box".

Except for an operating system, of course.

I'm not even sure it's more full-featured than non-OS application platforms, like Java. Mostly what it has is a large install base.

I'm not sure that I could create/style a Java based application nearly as easily as HTML markup and CSS though.

That may be true, depending on how you look at it? JavaScript was the language that, as Eric Lippert put it, was designed to "make the monkey dance.[1]" HTML and CSS and JavaScript are all designed around this ethos of try to figure out what was meant and throw SOMETHING on the screen. It's very forgiving, and it's really easy to get up and running with it quick. I'm not sure that's the same as full-featured; it makes a lot of things more accessible than Java or .NET or Win32 or Cocoa. But it doesn't have the width of functionality they do (it is catching up, admittedly, but they're not required to stay static either) and it makes more complicated tasks more difficult, especially if you need them to be performant.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/221615/why-do...

I've had the opposite experience.

If you can be flexible enough with the definition of 'full-featured' to read as 'able to run/produce more', I would argue that 'the browser' – if it encompasses http, html, javascript, and css – is more full-featured than Java. And we wouldn't even need to argue that the former's install base towers over the latter's.

Most OSes don't have render/styling systems that come close to what a browser does at their core... you can do a lot, but those features you have to often work for, or use libraries on top of the OS. And if you consider UI toolkits on top of the OS separate from the OS that's another issue.

In the end it all runs on an operating system... so it technically falls short of that of course, but building a web-based app is generally easier than raw-coding an application from the OS level.

Is this some sort of elaborate troll?

> both my parents and grandparents are all on ChromeOS laptops now

This is pretty much one of the two markets I've ever heard of for ChromeOS machines, the other being education space. What they have in common is that:

1) People want them for SOMEBODY ELSE 2) Because they don't trust that somebody else with the power of a less locked-down machine.

Sure, schools are buying ChromeOS machines... for the students. Not the teachers and administrators. It's too limited of a market segment for ChromeOS to grow a large enough userbase.

Actually, my parents got them themselves.. I got one for my grandmother when her computer crashed (I was so happy, I ordered her a chromebook and had it overnighted). She was so happy with it... My mom got hers after she saw it, and knowing that it didn't have to deal with viruses, all they ever did was browse, email, facebook. My dad got his about six months later, and my other grandmother got hers about six months ago.

They've all been very happy with them... well, one of my grandmothers has trouble with using it sometimes, her hand shakes, but that's a problem with desktops for her too.

I used one for about a year and if I were able to use the VPN to remote into work (stupid proprietary VPN software), I'd probably still be using it... I used remote desktop and SSH to other systems when I needed more for work, but was pretty happy with it. Yes, there were times I needed more, I had a desktop for that... one at work, another at home... most of the time I used my chromebook though.

These days aside from at work, I use my htpc for more web stuff than anything else... I've tried a few android and arm based mini systems for that role, but the experience was less than stellar.. currently an i3-5010u which does pretty well for my general use, and htpc chores. I'm on it right now.

Most people only use/need the web for home use... Chromebooks are great for that... There's even a few halfway decent general purpose email clients being worked on (one client to work over imap, etc for multiple accounts) as opposed to typical webmail. That was about the only shortcoming I really felt. Also, getting my private rsa token for SSH setup on the thing was a little bit of a pain.

I think Chromebooks will go down in history as an example of a very viable product for some particular niches, such as those that you mentioned, which isn't a big enough product to be interesting to Google.

Almost everyone not at work, and most students.. just a tiny little niche.

> A modern browser is the most full-featured application platform that has ever existed in terms of what comes "in the box".

Nope, it was called Smalltalk.

Don't let nostalgia blind you: Smalltalk was great, but 2015 browsers are obviously a lot more capable. Not because of any great design insight, but because they need to run things like YouTube, WebGL and whatever else.

JavaScript is not the only way to do things; cf. Native Client[1].

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/overview

Things that all software on the planet is compatible with if you would just redesign and recompile and ...

* chromebooks

* web browsers

* a turing machine implemented by having a grad student a car drive around on a long street

* https://xkcd.com/505/

Of course it might be a bit slower, it might take a bit more effort, time and imagination on the part of the user.

But seriously: it needs to run existing programs without recompilation.

That's beside the point made in the OP, which attributed Chrome's great security to its lack of functionality, which is just false. You argument is a valid one with respect to its lack of popularity.

That said, while compatibility helps adoption, it is not absolutely necessary. If it were, we would all be stuck with Windows computers in our pockets running on Atom processors having 1:30 hours battery life.

why do you consider running in a sandbox "useless" ? that's pretty extreme. you really can't think of any use at all for code running in a context where its ability to take power away from the user, and do things without the users permission is greatly reduced? Is your primary goal and idea of utility about doing those sorts of things?

..Or maybe you simply have a deficient imagination?

Couldn't you make a very similar argument for most smartphones and tablets? Their adoption seems to be going pretty well.

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