Seven Days In The Browser

Today begins a seven-day experiment, loyal reader. For seven days, I will compute exclusively in the web browser. 

I was talking with a friend at dinner about how aggressively the internet has matured, providing countless browser-based solutions to tasks that used to require the installation of large programs on your computer. Basic photo editing, for example, used to require heavy (and expensive) tools like Adobe Photoshop. Today, there are a number of excellent sites like Picnik that allow you to upload and edit photos quickly and easily - all without having to create an account. The notion that computers would one day run exclusively in the web browser (meaning no other local programs installed/available) has been proposed countless times; Google's Chrome OS is an aggressively toward that vision of the future.

Is it possible yet? Does the internet offer solutions to every task I might want to perform on my PC? This is what I'll be investigating for the next seven days. A week of delightful living. A week using only a web browser. 

For seven days, I will only open Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox on my PC, and no other program. I already migrated from Outlook to Gmail a couple years ago, but some other applications will be difficult to replace on a full-time basis:

For music needs, I'll be ditching iTunes and Windows Media Center for Pandora and Last.fm

I consume most video on my PC through the internet anyway, and I'll be making use of the usual suspects: YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix Instant Play.

As a full-time law student, I find myself constantly running various Microsoft Office apps - especially Word and OneNote. Since I do my email/task/calendaring through Google, I'll be trying Google Docs again for the next seven days. This is a bit nerve-wrecking, as I've had some terrible experiences with Docs in the past. I may also experiment with Microsoft's browser-based Office Live suite.

Homework requires me to do a lot of PDF-reading. I'll be ditching Adobe Reader and Foxit, substituting them with Google Docs Viewer.

I use Google Talk and AIM for my Facebook/Gchat/AIM instant messaging. This week, I'll be trying out Meebo, a browser-based instant messaging site that lets you log into multiple accounts at once.

I usually rely on Skype for voice/video calls. This weekend, I'll finally make some calls and send some texts with my Google Voice account.

Screenwriting is a hobby of mine, and I most often use Final Draft. I'll be ditching Final Draft and revisiting Scripped this week. From what I can tell, it's improved a lot over the last year.

There are probably a few other programs that I'm going to have to learn how to replace (or more likely, go without). I'll be back next week to let you all know how it went, and what I learned. And probably bitch about Google Docs. 

Cheers!