Likes

No maintenance – I work on computers all day, and most of the time, the last thing I want to do when I get home is fix a computer. I just want things to work after fighting with servers, users, and software all day. Without extra software cluttering up the computer, it makes things work as intended and I don’t have to worry about the registry having issues or spyware/malware coming in and taking over the machine. In addition to this is that the software and extensions aut0-update so I don’t have to even worry about going and grabbing the latest version of software or keep delaying updates to the OS, it all just happens automagically.

Zero boot-time – Talk about a fast boot-time. If I shut down the computer completely, it still only takes about 15 seconds for me to start the machine and log in to the OS where I can begin browsing. An added bonus is that the sleep mode works even faster. When I shut the lid to my CR-48, it puts the computer into a state of sleep, and as soon as I open up the lid, within 4 seconds, I am back where I started without the long wake up cycle of other operating systems, and it somehow doesn’t deplete my battery.

Battery – Speaking of battery, I know that it is the hardware that makes the battery last forever, but the battery is amazing on Chrome OS. Since it doesn’t have to fight with everything else on the system, the battery lasts an obscenely long time, especially for netbook specs.

Dislikes

No interactivity with a local network – I know that this is supposed to be the OS of the future with ties to the cloud and nothing else, but there are those of us who do have things on our local network that need to be accessed like network file shares and servers through RDP or VNC.

Audio/Video/Photo Editing – There are some absolutely awesome web apps out there for editing multimedia, but they aren’t as robust as a desktop application. And for large amounts of photos, or a large video, you would have to upload a video, then start editing it, which would mean quite a bit of upload time depending on your uplink speed.

No compatibility mode - With Chrome on Windows, you can install IE tab so that it renders pages using IE in case a website won’t work properly in Chrome, like a bank website or internal company site that is only compatible with IE.  You don’t have that option in Chrome OS as the browser doesn’t have access to IE as a backup in case something starts working. So you can just wait for the tech support person at your bank to say “Sorry, we only work with IE and Safari”.

This is not to say that any of these things either make me get rid of my windows machine, or go crawling back to it all of the time. But it definitely means that I have to have a backup computer available in case any of these issues come up.

Currently, the ChromeBook is a great secondary computer, much like the iPad. It could be even better going forward, but it isn’t quite there yet. There are a lot of great features in Chrome OS that make sense and make life much easier, but there are those times where you feel like you could rip someone’s head off because it can’t do a specific function you need.

What are your favorite features or most needed features of Chrome OS?

The extension was good before, but now it adds a very nice feature for those of us who don’t want to save all of the extra content on sidebars and ads when clipping a page.

New in version 5.0.14.9248, you can now issue article clips where only the body of a post on the page will save to your notebook, and not sidebars, headers, footers, and everything else, though you do still have that as an option.

It also changes the way it looks to make it a little nicer for adding comments and tags.

Another new feature that you may use, if for some reason you use another search engine besides Google, is that you now have the option of including Simultaneous search on Bing and Yahoo the way it has integrated with Google for some time now.

Overall, it’s a good upgrade, though we are still waiting for the ability to clip directly to a shared notebook. I’m sure it’s coming down the line.

Check out their blog for more.

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