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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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".

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?

> 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.

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