We've all heard the criticism and seen countless photos from schoool administrators showing piles of chromebooks collecting dust - Chromebooks only get a few years of software updates before they are abandoned and sent to a e-waste landfill or sold off for scrap. It looks like Google is finally looking to change that perception with a major announcement that will see Chrome OS devices supported for over a decade.
It should not come as a shock that I am a huge fan of ChromeOS/ChromiumOS and while I am clearly a fan, I am also very critical of the operating system and want to see it evolve. A bit over 3 years ago, I wrote a article on my website outlining some of the major shortcomings with ChromeOS in 2017 and I am happy to say that ChromeOS has come a very long way. A lot of new and impressive features have come to ChromeOS since my post including proper SD card support for Android, upgrading the dated Android 6.0 and various other improvements that were not on my radar such as Linux application support. ChromeOS is a great operating system that has been a daily driver of mine for a long time but there are still several major shortcomings that I would love to see resolved in future releases of ChromeOS.
Microsoft used to have a internal mantra known as “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” that helped to ensure that they always maintained market dominance. This was the driving force behind Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft’s Microsoft Java Virtual Machine, Microsoft Virtual PC and countless other products. This strategy essentially had Microsoft embracing promising new technologies and extending the features of the technology (often by adding exclusive features that work best on Windows) and then using their newfound market dominance to destroy the competing products. Aside from a few legal battles, this strategy often proved very successful for Microsoft however for some unknown reason, Microsoft decided to take a different approach with Google’s line of products – “Troll, Smear and Embrace”. I have compiled a list of my top 3 examples.
The fact that it was not possible to route traffic on a Crostini container over a VPN has been one of the most annoying bugs for developers who wish to use their Chromebooks to work in a corporate environment. Google has been working on a fix since I reported it over a year ago. The community of Chromebook owners were saddened to report that the fix was pushed back to M76 about 2 weeks ago. It looks like Google is going to squeeze it into M75, specifically in build 12104.0.0 which may hit the developer channel any day now.
Heads up to all ChromeOS users in the dev channel. I am currently going through the changelogs to understand what changed and will be updating this post as I find things. If you spot anything, please feel free to drop a comment below.
Update : Resolved (At least for me)
If you are like me and use your Trusty Google Home as a alarm to wake up every morning, you may be a bit late to work today as all Google Home Minis, Google Home and Google Home Max units are currently having major issues today. Most of my units are giving a generic “Something went wrong” error when saying “Ok Google” and others are acting as if it was factory reset. Here is a video of one of mine
If you have been a user of personal assistants for a while, you would have noticed that Apple’s Siri has been falling behind, outpacing Microsoft’s Cortana with Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant taking the lead. It was not even a fair fight to begin with but if you were one of the folks who attended Google I/O 2018 in person or remotely you would have caught a demo of some of the features that Google has been working on bringing to Google Assistant. Lets explore a few of these features in more detail.
Google has gotten a fair amount of phrase over the updated GMail redesign that was made available for users to begin testing yesterday. GMail has adopted a modern re-design that is simply stunning. Aside from the re-design, Google has introduced a few new features such as smart replies, integration with Keep and other Google Applications and self-destructing messages. Sadly one feature that is missing is one that has been requested for years – Native OpenPGP support!
Since its launch in late 2017, the Google Pixelbook has been a smash hit with owners (including myself) regardless of the early criticisms of some tech reviewers. I have owned by Pixelbook for several months and it has quickly become my daily driver. It is simply great but if Google were to let me loose in their development lab for a day, these are the changes I would make to the Pixelbook.
Rumors of a Google sponsored cell phone service have been around since the launch of the HTC Dream in 2008. These rumors were accelerated with Google purchasing the VoIP provider Grand Central less then a year later (later re-branded to Google Voice). Google Voice had an amazing launch but later became a barren wasteland which failed to receive the attention it deserved, many felt their dreams of a Google phone service slowly die a painful death. Google Voice eventually became integrated with Google Hangouts which helped to jumpstart its use. Finally, on April 22nd of 2015, Google was ready to show off Project Fi, the first Google MVNO. Here are my thoughts