My week on the CR-48 wasn't all wine and roses. There are things that I found difficult to deal with. These were not because they were specific to the hardware, but because they were issues with the OS itself.
Let's start with the elephant in the room. ChromeOS does not currently run native applications. For many things this isn't a problem. As previously stated, web apps can handle everything from social networks (TweetDeck), to office applications (Google Docs), to cloud storage (Dropbox). There are things it can't do.
I needed to download a Linux ISO. There was no Bittorrent support. My RSS feed was configured to grab video files from sites like Revision3 and the TWiT network. There is very little native media support, and no actual podcast catcher, so I had to use my phone for a lot of that. Skype support only exists through third party applications like imo, and those don't support voice or video chat well. This last could be fixed by the integration of Skype with Facebook as announced this week, but as I understand this it would not let me speak to those two whom I am not already connected by Facebook.
Then there's Flash. I mentioned this earlier as a plus, and it is one. It's also however something of a minus as well, since Flash support on ChromeOS can at times be a bit buggy. In particular, having multiple tabs with flash video containers (like the ones found at Blip.tv or Hulu) open at the same time can cause the OS to hang, and for those tabs to crash. Since I like to watch videos in sequence and I like to let them buffer all at once, this is a problem for me.
This doesn't make Flash unusable by any stretch, but it does occasionally get extremely irritating. When Flash stops functioning on a ChromeOS machine I've found that it doesn't tend to respond on any page after it does so until a restart has been performed.
Lastly, there are some sites it just doesn't play well with. Leaving aside Netflix (which we are told there will be a plugin for), there are sites that just don't seem to like Chrome OS very much. For instance, I use Hotmail as one of my mail accounts and while it is usable, it is VERY slow and sometimes the page will not load properly.
This isn't really Google's fault, of course. The current configuration of Hotmail is a dog on many browsers. I used to use Opera lot, and it was horrible on that on pretty much any computer and OS I tried. It's no great shakes on the Windows version of Chrome either. Still, it is an issue for those people who use web services not controlled by Google.
So, how does this all fit together? We'll get to that next time.
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