Behind The Big E

I literally just found out about this yesterday, and was just blown back by it.

So probably everyone knows by now that google has their own web browser, chrome, which is, to say the least, pretty decent. It’s faster than my other ones, and the extensions available are good, but it has it’s drawbacks too. There is no integrated PDF reader, so you have to download all the online PDF docs that you read online, which is a pain for a lot of university students. I noticed that it also takes up a lot of RAM when you include all the workers and renderers. Overall for browsing, it’s pretty much the way to go.

So anyway, yesterday I find this site about Google’s new OS. Wait… wha? Can they do that?

Yes, apparently they can. Google has been making it’s presence known on the internet for some time, absorbing sites like YouTube, making ads, and putting together utterly massive projects like street view. (Honestly, the sheer amount of data that is involved in that blew my mind! I checked it out recently, and could not believe that there was a 360 degree view every few metres on nearly every street known to man, or so it seems.) They are seriously a crazy company.

So now, they have taken another step further and added themselves to the list of operating systems along with Windows, Mac and Linux. I mean, it’s not technically like its cousins, just because of how it is put together.

Basically how it works is your entire computer gets turned into an internet browser and nearly nothing else. They advertise that you can play games, write documents, listen to music and the like, but it’s way different than anything we’re used to from an OS. Pretty much all of your data is stored “in the cloud”, which essentially means that all your files are online, attached to your gmail account.

Consequentially, this means that a computer with Chromium OS on it will be useless if you are not connected to the internet, and you have to be pretty trusting of google, as they are storing all your stuff on your account.

So, all in all, this is pretty much for a cheap, secondary (or even tertiary) laptop that all you do is go on the internet with. One of their sell points is the outrageously fast start time from total system shutdown (around 8 seconds), which they say cuts down the time you are waiting to get onto your browser. I myself don’t really find this particularly useful, as I keep my MB pro on sleep, so it really takes me no time at all to start what I’m doing. I did however use Windows for much of my life (I still keep a windows 7 partition on my Mac for emergencies), and by the end of it I was going absolutely insane having to wait for it to start up, or randomly update before I could log in, and then I was furiously clicking on the internet explorer icon until it finally started and loaded the home page.

Anyway, I guess we will find out what it really is like in practice once it’s released, but I will remain skeptical in the mean time. I’ve got one computer for everything right now, and would prefer to keep it that way just for my own convenience.