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I've never used one so I can't attest to their efficacy in practice, but there are plenty of apps available that will work offline: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/offli...

Also, many people I know with $1000+ MacBooks use them for almost nothing but web browsing.

Inside Google, MacBooks are essentially used as Chromebooks with aluminium cases ;)

If you feel like getting a tad nerdy, you can run other Linux distros alongside ChromeOS. They make nice dev books.

Sent from my Acer C720 running Elementary OS.

The problem is the browser on the iPad is nearly useless for anything but the most casual of browsing due to memory constraints on the device and the lack of virtual memory/swap.

I often run into situations where I literally cannot have just 2 tabs open in Safari and switch between them without losing everything I've typed into text fields since it runs out of memory and dumps the other tab.

What are you doing?

I bought an iPad 2 on release, and still use it to this day. I've literally never run into the problem that you describe, and for a few months I did all of my work on it.

Nope! There is crouton, and other solutions, or full blown linux running from SD-card or from the device itself. It's very open.