My browser as my computer – a failed experiment

Couple months back, I read an article about the future of computing that just made me very excited. Just short of ecstatic you can even say.

It’s time for us to take advantage of the amazing opportunity that is before us,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, kicking off Google I/O 2009 in San Francisco. Schmidt was referring to the growing sense that the Internet and browsers–rather than a computer’s operating system–will be the future foundation for application development.
Tom Krazit

Honestly, I was tired of my computer getting slower just months after a fresh reformat – and I was serious about reformatting. Every time I got a new PC, the PC had to be cleanly reformatted to get rid of the extra unnecessary “features” the vendor adds to it. Then, after 10-12 months, the process of reformatting had to be repeated as the computer would invariably slow down. The process was exciting in my teens, but as time went on, it became a chore. Defragmenting did not help and I was not willing to spend extra dough on more RAM for programs that used to run fast.

When I read about the idea of using the browser as the computer, I thought this would solve my problems. After all, it would mean I would need to install less programs on my machine. My computer could now become the lean mean machine with consistent performance. I will have access to all my programs not only from one machine, but any machine. Need a word processor? Just log on to Google Docs. Need to read my ebooks? Easy enough. Since it’s all stored in my Box.net account, I can access my ebooks anywhere, even on vacation (not that I think that’s a smart idea).

This idea intrigued me and I set up my own experiment to see how well it would work for me. I got rid of Microsoft Office. If I needed to view a PowerPoint presentation, I uploaded it to my Google Docs account and viewed it there. I stored my ebooks on my online storage account. When I needed reference materials at work, it was now easy to get it. No more storing data on DVD-RW’s or flash drives. Those were old fashioned methods.

It worked great until the day I needed a document that I had spent hours formatting. I downloaded the file as a PDF. Somehow, Google Docs managed to turn my beautifully formatted one page document to a non-balanced two paged document. I tried adjusting the top and bottom margins, hoping miraculously the extra space on top would disappear. Nada!

Since time was of essence, I tried Zoho. Saved the file as a word document from Google and uploaded it to Zoho. Worse! My carefully aligned bullets were missing in action and liberal spaces now dotted my one page document. Frustrated, I claimed defeat. I went back to my software collection, installed the trusty old Microsoft Office – and redid my once perfect document.

I am still hopeful though, I am sure the perfect experiment is in the near future.