Experiment: Seven Days In The Browser

By Aaron Ting

I embarked on an experiment recently to see whether I could make it a full week using only the web browser on my PC. To be clear, I promised you readers that I would not use any locally-installed applications. The advent of full browser-based computing with efforts like Google's Chrome OS raises an important question: Does the internet offer web-based solutions to every task I perform on my computer?

The answer: Not yet, but we're close.

Music
Ditching iTunes was a pleasure. To be clear, I pretty much hate iTunes. It's a bloated and frustrating experience, like having to store your music inside the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

I usually mix it up with Windows Media Player, Zune Player, and VLC. For the past week, I abandoned all of those programs and dusted off my Pandora and Last.fm accounts. Both are extremely versatile, but I started getting tired of 'recommended' music; for the record, Taylor Swift should not be played on my Train station. Also, I dislike commercials - even if they're implemented sparingly.

I also checked out Grooveshark, an interesting Pandora alternative which allows you to save and retrieve songs in a traditional playlist. I played with SoundCloud for a bit, which is an awesome platform for discovering a lot of independent music.

Unfortunately, I just couldn't find a decent cloud-based service that provides on-demand music. Spotify needs to come to the U.S., because until I can pick the actual songs I want to listen to, Pandora and Last.fm will only be an alternative to playing stuff out of my own music library - not a replacement. They're great for discovering new music, but aren't well suited to my musical ADHD. I'd like to see a web service that allows me to upload and play my personal music library from the cloud. I hear HP might do something like this.

Productivity

In my last piece, I was pretty honest about my fear of having to use Google Docs. I've had bad experiences with it in the past, but I decided to give it another shot. I have to admit, Google Docs has improved a ton since I last checked it out. I liked the ease of having my documents made easily accessible on the cloud without having to use a middle-man solution like Dropbox. Unfortunately, Docs still lacks a lot of richness that the standard Office suite provides. A lot of extras are available like footnotes, tables, and paragraph alignment, but none of them felt as precise or customizable as your typical Microsoft Word program. Similarly, creating detailed presentations and spreadsheets with Google Docs is totally plausible - but it just never felt preferable.

I also checked Microsoft's Office Web Apps - a suite of very simplified Office programs that run in the browser. Two major problems:

First, Microsoft blocks you from trying to use these web apps unless you're running Internet Explorer. This was ridiculously frustrating as I almost never use Internet Explorer. This was an incredibly incompetent implementation choice on Microsoft's part, and they need to resolve it if they want to become a serious player in the the web-based productivity war. If Office is available for Macs, then its web-Office should damn well be available to Chrome users.

Second, this web-based version of Word is pretty limited. It's like using Microsoft Office 95 - it just doesn't have enough rich functionality, which is unfortunate because that's really the best thing going for Microsoft's standard Office suite. I didn't get a chance to try out the beta of Microsoft's upcoming cloud-based Office 365 suite, which will replace their Web Apps to compete more closely with Google Docs.

Communications, etc.
Google Voice is great. Video chat quality was excellent, and making free calls and sending free text messages was spectacular. In fact, I really prefer it to Skype, but I'm going to continue using Skype until Google Voice becomes mass-adopted. Put simply, Voice isn't fun if you don't have as many people to talk to.

I really hate the clunky/buggy feel of Facebook's built-in chat and prefer using a separate IM client for chatting with Facebook friends. To replace my local instant messaging clients, I used Meebo. It's a decent browser solution for doing IM with Facebook and AIM contacts. Likewise, I ditched Google's locally-installed Talk client and just used Gmail for IMing my Google friends. I'm still not sold on browser-based IM. Meebo was pretty decent, but Facebook's built-in chat tool is so terrible and buggy. It really shouldn't be that hard to implement something better. Seriously, Facebook's own site shouldn't be offering the worst Facebook Chat experience on the internet.

I used a few other web services like Scripped and Adobe's browser-based Photoshop tool. In general, I was pretty impressed. I'm still looking for a good browser-based video editing tool.

Verdict
Sorry, Google fanboys, but I don't think the internet is rich enough yet to support exclusively-browser-based computing. There's a ton of stuff you can do in a browser these days, but I don't think we're at the point where you'd prefer to do a lot of this stuff on the web. Services like Picnik and Google Docs show that we're definitely headed in that direction. Running programs through the browser should be happening, because there are a ton of benefits. The consumer can gain a lot in regard to ease-of-access, software costs, and performance. Being able to edit heavier media like photos and sound files without having to leverage any of my own laptop's resources is fantastic - I really wish we could see more browser-based video editors to give Final Cut and Premiere a run for their money.

But until these offerings mature and provide benefits which eclipse the functional richness and high performance of locally-installed programs, we'll be stuck using Windows and Mac OS for a while.