Riddle me this, my fellow tech-contemplating primate: What exactly is ChromeOS?
It’s a simple-seeming question that’s deceptively difficult to answer. If there’s been one near-constant with Google’s ChromeOS operating system since its launch nearly 12 years ago, it’s the platform’s perpetual state of foundational change.
In its earliest days, ChromeOS represented an ahead-of-its-time vision for an exceptionally focused kind of cloud-centric computing — one in which you quite literally just had a full-screen browser window and nothing else around it. The philosophy was admirable, but the concept was arguably a touch too ambitious and something that went overboard in its drive to strip back our digital domains.