Living with Chromebook: First Steps (Premium)

Chromebooks are often touted as a simpler and less expensive alternative to a Windows laptop. And that’s true, to a point. But many potential Chromebook users—especially older users and others who are familiar with Windows—will experience the same frustrations I do in making this switch because we have so many hardwired habits and requirements. 

For sure, the basics are familiar.  

Chrome OS boots into a desktop environment that has on-screen elements that look and work like the Start button and Start menu, the taskbar, and the notification area that we know from Windows. You can pin your favorite apps to the taskbar, and those apps can run full-screen or in a floating window. And there are notifications, which appear in the bottom right of the display and are collected for late examination when missed. 

That’s by design—early versions of Chrome OS were even more like Windows than it is today—and it’s helpful for making the transition. But there are numerous differences, most small if not subtle, that make this transition a bit more difficult. And I think it helps to remember two things: That Chrome OS is designed as a companion to Android and has thus incorporated some user experiences from that platform. And second, that the native apps in Chrome OS are all web-based, and are in many ways not as flexible as the legacy desktop applications we know from Windows. 

A little preparation will help in both cases.  

I assume that most Chrome OS users are Android users as well. Experience with Android will absolutely help when it comes to using Chrome OS. And it will provide some nice integration pieces that aren’t possible if you’re using an iPhone.  

But even if you’re not thinking about switching to Chromebook in the future, you should get started with using web apps—or just web pages that look and feel like apps—in Chrome (or the new Edge) on Windows today. This is something I’ve written about in the past, but it’s especially central to the Chromebook experience, so let’s go over it quickly again. 

As you may know, Chrome—and the new Edge—lets you pin any web page to your desktop and/or taskbar and access it as if it were a standalone (and native) app. If it’s a real web app, like a Progressive Web App (PWA), you’ll get additional capabilities too; they vary by web app but can include such things as notification support and the ability to run offline. But any web page will work. 

To get started, simply navigate to the web page/app you wish to use and then select the menu icon (“…”) in the upper right of the Chrome window. In the menu that appears, select Install (if it’s a web app) or More tools > Create shortcut. 

If it’s just a web page, you’ll be prompted to accept or change the shortcut’s name and whether it should “open as a window,” which it should, if you want it to look and work like an app. Otherwise, it will just open in a Chrome tab. 

If it’s a real web app, and you’re given an Install option, you only need to confirm that you wish to install it. 

In both cases, the web page/app will open in a new “chromeless” window (assuming you selected “Open as a window” for a web page) and a shortcut to the app/page is placed on your desktop. You can pin the page/app to your taskbar, and can size/place its window as needed, just as you can any normal app. 

If you sign-in to Chrome with your Google account—mandatory in Chrome OS—the pages and apps you add in this way are synced from machine to machine. You can see which pages/apps you’ve added by navigating to chrome://apps (edge://apps in Microsoft Edge).  

You can right-click any page/app in this interface and remove it or toggle that “Open as a window” option if you need to. But it is perhaps more profound to know that this interface is used as the basis for the Start menu equivalent in Chrome OS. The only major thing that’s different is that you’ll also see Android apps in Chrome OS. 

We’ll get to that. But speaking of your Google account, you’ll want to make sure that yours is active and working, and that you can sign-in, before bringing up a Chromebook for the first time. That way, you’ll just sign-in and all of your pinned web pages/apps and other synced items (passwords, bookmarks, extensions, browsing history, and so on) will be immediately available.

We’ll discuss that first run experience next.