I've been doing this for a little while on a cheapo chromebook.
It works, but it is brutally slow and clunky (this is on a 2018 entry-level intel celeron n3350 + 4gb ram chromebook) to run something like firefox. It is usable, but you'll get frustrated fairly fast.
Unfortunately the same can be said about the chromebook in general - have more than one browser tab open on a javascript heavy page (e.g. large google doc + gmail + calendar) and its really slow there too anyway so I guess I cant hope for much.
I feel like web apps have got significantly more complex, while the compute in the entry level chromebooks has more or less stagnated over the past few years. Just doesn't feel like there is enough power to make things comfortable and seamless to use. I've used a couple of intel i5/i7 chromebooks and they've been lovely to use with snappy performance, but the price for that performance is approaching/exceeding that of a "real" laptop (sometimes wildly exceeding the price of a normal windows laptop, or even a mac for the case of Google's chromebooks) so it kinda defeats the point in my mind.
I used to recommend chromebooks to all non-tech savvy people who asked me (parents, relatives, friends etc), now I hesitate to do so because the performance is just not there unless you really pay huge sums.
The script heavy stuff in general is a pain in my experience. I have a 2995U + 4gb ram chromebook that just runs Arch, and gmail/drive/etc are crazy slow. Even scrolling through the newest stuff on thingiverse for an hour with however many loaded images is faster than some of google's pages/apps. On the plus side, Firefox seems to handle 50-100+ loaded tabs well as long as there isn't too much stuff going on with them.
Thanks for the heads up! I enabled layout.display-list.retain (two other options related to HW acceleration were already enabled), and it might be faster, but I'm not sure about that.
It works, but it is brutally slow and clunky (this is on a 2018 entry-level intel celeron n3350 + 4gb ram chromebook) to run something like firefox. It is usable, but you'll get frustrated fairly fast.
Unfortunately the same can be said about the chromebook in general - have more than one browser tab open on a javascript heavy page (e.g. large google doc + gmail + calendar) and its really slow there too anyway so I guess I cant hope for much.
I feel like web apps have got significantly more complex, while the compute in the entry level chromebooks has more or less stagnated over the past few years. Just doesn't feel like there is enough power to make things comfortable and seamless to use. I've used a couple of intel i5/i7 chromebooks and they've been lovely to use with snappy performance, but the price for that performance is approaching/exceeding that of a "real" laptop (sometimes wildly exceeding the price of a normal windows laptop, or even a mac for the case of Google's chromebooks) so it kinda defeats the point in my mind.
I used to recommend chromebooks to all non-tech savvy people who asked me (parents, relatives, friends etc), now I hesitate to do so because the performance is just not there unless you really pay huge sums.