andrewducker | Stop! Web Time!

Do you mean time as in 'work hours' or just in general time? I always have a chat window open, even if I'm mostly using Writer, Photoshop or watching a video.

Work? I'm asking about home computer usage...

(as in, if you happen to work from home then discount that time, I'm only interested in personal usage for the purposes of this)

Edited 2010-12-15 14:24 (UTC)

OK, let me try again.

I am online 100% of the time I am on my computer in my apartment - I don't ever turn off my network connection and I always have access to my email and my dropbox.

I also, sometimes, use Writer, Photoshop and other applications that operate on my hard drive. But I spend 100% of my home computer time using the internet.

But what percentage of that time is spent on the web?

I think you're asking someone to delineate their time who's a bit like me. I am always doing something on the web, even if I'm also doing stuff that's not.

For example, right now I'm surfing LJ, writing with Erin, watching Newsnight on the iPlayer, and editing content for the Trav website. Asking me to tell you what percentage of that is online is basically impossible.

I would have thought you'd be able to tell me how much of it is what, though. iPlayer is on the web, so is LJ. Content editing presumably requires a text editor of some kind which isn't web based. What percentage of the time would you say that a non-browser window was the one which was the topmost one?

This is what I asked in the first comment.

Really? I don't parse your question the same way at all. I thought you were asking about work time versus home time (i.e. 9-5 vs evenings, or whatever your work schedule is). Clearly we were talking at right angles.

Again, what do you count?

The iPlayer is going the whole time, and is side-by-side with my text editor as I edit => 100%

But I have absolutely no idea how much of my time is being spent answering LJ comments vs Photoshopping (I switched from content editing to image editing since that last comment) and even if I sat with a timer I wouldn't get an accurate representation - sometimes it's just a case flipping between the two windows and refreshing a page, sometimes I'll pause for a few moments, sometimes I'll take the time to type something. When I have my browser window minimised I keep my gmail inbox as the tab of focus, and half an eye will always be checking my inbox for new mail. While I'm sitting using Photoshop all my physical interaction is with that, but basically none of my attention is on it because I'm just resizing images - I'm barely looking at them.

I don't think this is that unusual - for many people there is simply no physical way to unpick the difference between time 'on the web' or 'off the web' on their computers. I can categorically say that I absolutely need non-web applications. But I am always on the web.

Aaah. I know that I have a web browser open all of the time at work, but my attention is on other things the majority of the time. I come back to it frequently, and I'd estimate that I'm refreshing at least one page every five minutes, but total time taken on the web versus other things is less than 20%. I'm surprised you don't have more of an idea how your attention is apportioned, that's all.

I'm surprised that that surprises you given our many discussions about my issues with attention focus.

I'm surprised that my surprise surprises you, considering how often I forget things :->

But yeah, I guess you aren't aware of yourself in that way. Makes sense.

100%. My email, feed reader and Livejournal are all webbased.

Yes, but if you're writing a document are you also surfing the web? I can't do both at the same time, if one thing requires concentration/effort.

I can't do one thing at a time, and I am envious of anyone who has achieved that level of concentration. What

marrog says pretty much applies to me.

Gotcha. I'm the opposite. I can't write anything good, or code well unless I build up the complex structures that compose it in my head. Distractions from that make it all go away, which is why interruption is pretty much anathema to getting good work done (for me).

Right now I'm typing into LJ, I have Microsoft Outlook on the other screen showing me my mail, my editor is opening a document from the file server, iPlayer is streaming the Bob Harris show (but equally I could have had iPlayer download a TV show to my harddisk and watch it "offline/non-web".

I have Excel, our Agile work tracker, three communicator windows (non-web IM) open and several apps minimised/on the tool\taskbar waiting for things to happen.

And that's at work ... at home it's pretty much the same though I may have a web or non-web video convertor making phone versions of US TV series that I picked from a browser window but that are downloaded by uTorrent ...

Much of what I do *can* be done on the web, but in many cases I choose to use a local app, either because I like the interface, or because I want to leave the bandwidth available for other apps.

I use Office quite a bit (but then my laptop is my work machine too) but I rarely use Word except that Outlook invokes it for email composition.

I could never see me using anything other than a decent PC though - too much gaming and other file-dependent stuff rather that purely web-based, even outside work.

Also, did you mean "web" or "internet", because the likes of Spotify, VPNs and Trillian mean I'm online almost all day but not necessarily using a browser.

Web. i.e. not using an app.

In that case, my original poll answer stands.

That's a distinction that could be getting harder to make with HTML5/webapps.

For our next generation of Nokia phones, 3rd party app development will either be Qt/QtQuick (cross-platform apps that will run on Symbian and on Meego Linux with minimal changes) or WebApps that will run in the browser, even if they are loaded from your local storage rather than over a data connection.

So "Web i.e. no using an app" is not really true even now. If I'm running Bejewelled Blitz on my PC, it's probably in a Facebook page, but if I'm running it on my iPhone then often I'm running it with no data connection, but sometimes I am ...

Apps that run inside the web are fine. I'm mostly wondering about how many people I know could survive with a Chrome laptop.

I'm assuming you mean "inside the browser" :-)

As the *sole* machine, it would probably need more "web apps" and a reasonable amount of on device storage ... but as something like an iPad with a physical keyboard then I'd certainly have a use for something like this.

It's basically the old idea of a web appliance or thin client, where most of the storage etc. would be up on the cloud, files held in dropbox or similar, and perhaps even using cloud processor cycles etc. for things like image editing etc. with the webapp mostly doing presentation layer and only having a lower res work copy to mark up the changes required and then the instructions sent to the cloud to make the actual changes to the full res version.

Like the iPhone and iPad, a lot of stuff will assume network connectivity and a reasonable bandwidth ...

for example, iPhone (I believe) does SatNav by having the maps and the processing to calculate routes up on the Google servers and not held in the phone (while a TomTom would have the maps and the direction processing in the device) ... I would expect/guess that the more complex apps for the Chrome laptop would do the same, big data and big processing up in the cloud, presentation and input through the Chrome browser.

e.g. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/audrey/index.html
http://computer.yourdictionary.com/internet-appliance

There was a time when the idea of a network appliance, or doing your email, surfing and gaming through your cable TV set-top box seemed a neat idea ... and it's still not going away, though some of it is moving to the XBox and PS3 crowd instead.

The Chrome netbook would be fine for most school use, for roaming data collection use, for web TV and other streaming media (including VoIP, Skype etc.), social media, scheduling, email, most word processing, spreadsheet usage etc.

The fastest and latest of games might not manage, but then they don't tend to run on most laptops now (too processor and graphics engine hungry). And just about anything else could be done with a client-server approach ... and this would tie in beautifully with bringing back a variant on Wave where you could do collaborative photo editing or other processor and graphics intensive tasks on cloud cpus and memory and just control and view it from the chrome laptop. And receive adverts while you're doing it! Or pay for processor time and storage based on how much you actually use rather than paying for a machine that spends most of the day switched off, or just downloading email sand torrents.

Sorry, yes, inside the browser.

And yeah, I think Google are banking on a lot of people working entirely online. I think they're ahead of themselves by a year or five.

OpenOffice has changed its name AGAIN, apparently. More drama with Oracle or whoever.

It has?
http://why.openoffice.org/

Nothing about it (that I can see) on the Open Office website.

Of course not. You don't think the numpties who are left behind would mention the fork, would you?

http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libreoffice

But that's not a change of name for Open Office, that's another fork (like Go-oo, which is being rolled into LibreOffice).

OpenOffice.org continues, as does LibreOffice. But given how much Oracle wants to charge for the ODF plugin for Microsoft Office, I'd certainly like to see LibreOffice succeed fabulously well (which it should as the official office suite for several of the Linux distros)

> But that's not a change of name for Open Office, that's another fork

Same thing for the end-user. One will come to dominate, and effectively BE OpenOffice-new-name.

I'm low on details -- I gleaned this from skim-reading a PC magazine recently. Just sounds like more linux freetardness to me though.

I don't play games, but Office, Eclipse and Photoshop are musts for me.

Even the creator of Gmail (who is no longer with Google) has said that he'd be very surprised if ChromeOS lasts a year. Most obvious thing would be for it to be absorbed into Android - which, in my opinion, would make for a very compelling platform.

I'm really enjoying the web store in my desktop version of Chrome though. Tweetdeck in particular is refreshing.

What's different about Tweetdeck in Chrome?

I'd also expect Chrome and Android to merge in some way. If Android supported being in something with a keyboard I'd be very happy.

It doesn't use Adobe Air - it seems to be a completely web standards compliant version, which is lovely. In my scientific tests it runs 9000% as fast.

Interesting. I'll have to have a dig. Not that I'm not entirely happy with my current copy of Tweetdeck.

When you say 'on the web', does that include time with chat programs like Jabber and AIM? Because I've got those running constantly, regardless of whatever else I'm doing -- like, right now, writing a paper. But if you're asking how much time I spend staring specifically at Firefox or Chrome, that's a different question.

If I could compose/format a paper in GoogleDocs and be confident that it would arrive in my professor's inbox looking just the way I want it to, I'd do it. But I haven't yet been impressed at the transition from one to the other.

"Web" is _purely_ the web. If it's a program then it's not on the web.

Would it count if I were running AIM through, say, meebo?

And then I had the moment of thinking, wait, does schoolwork/grading count as 'personal use' for a word processor? Because my inclination is to say yes, even though I realize intellectually it's for something that's paying me either way. But I do it on my own computer! ...Did I mention I have problems compartmentalizing?

For composing fiction, though? All GoogleDocs, all the time.

If you do it in a browser, it's the web. Otherwise it's the internet.

And yeah, you're not the only person who has problems differentiating between home and work ;->

I'd never be able to replace my machine with a Chrome OS alike device, mostly as the non-internet time is spent using DTP software. As is effortlessly proven by the system in place at my work, running this sort of software over a network is an excuse for terrible pain - moreso if it were over the internet.

Then again, I am a unique case in that respect.

Considering the people who use Photoshop, or video editing tools, I'd say not unique at all :->

I use Ableton (sound) and Vegas (video) a lot and yup, no way you want to run them over a network. With Vegas, I get away with the files being on the NAS box cos I use it through the 1Gb/s hardwired network and it's faster than my laptop's harddrive. Abelton seems to like the files local FAR better even so.

Sorry, I didn't word that correctly. I meant to suggest unique in comparison to the average respondant. As much as I'd like the potential job benefits, I'm not the only graphic designer in the world ;)

I pretty much don't use Word or its ilk – WYSIWYG word processors in the traditional sense – but not because I don't have the occasional need to send letters to people like HMRC or the council. I just use TeX in those situations, because I needed to know it anyway for larger jobs and there seemed no point learning another totally different system too.

I can see Google's point. At home I pretty much only use the PC for web or for gaming. Even at work, 99% of the time I only use office programs or a web browser. If we didn't have Microsoft Office installed as standard, and used an office suite that worked in a browser (such as Google Docs), there would be very little I, or any of the other folk that work here, would do that wouldn't run in a browser.

I haven't used any office software at home for years. A few months ago I actually had to send a letter, but used PC2Paper.com which for 65p printed out my letter and posted it without me having to worry about finding a stamp of a postbox.

Oooh, Pc2Paper looks useful!

My letter certainly got to the recipient, so I had no complaints. There are a few other companies offering similar services for people like me who are too lazy to walk to the post office and buy a stamp.

The Royal Mail used to do a similar service, and still does for business that want to do direct mail/marketing. I don't know if the personal service is still available.

E.g. they will send out your corporate christmas cards ... you pick a design, upload your customer address database, and they get sent cards
http://www.iredpartnership.com/christmas-solution/

And of course you don't need to walk to the post office to buy a stamp anymore, you can print them out on your printer at home.
http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/jump2?catId=400046&mediaId=106700775

I use my computer for non-web things but I'm usually flipping between stuff; not focussing on one thing exclusively. I usually have my web-browser open, even if I'm playing a game or writing a letter or something.

I almost never use word processors, if I want to write a document I'll normally do it in LaTeX in a text editor; I do use a spreadsheet for my personal accounting though (Open Office for me, MS Office doesn't run on Linux...).

I'm self-employed so home vs work usage often gets blurred. I do use MS Office at home regularly for non-work stuff though. I also have a browser window almost always open even if I'm not actively using it.

That's not an easy question.

I use OpenOffice and Google Docs a _lot_, but much of my writing/editing requires layout software so can't be entirely online. And I'll almost always have a browser window open for definitions, spell checks, grammar quibbles, etc. Sometimes I'll be corresponding with a writer, so that's Gmail or Talk. Some of my writing is on personal wikis before I drag it into layout/word processing. And then some of it is blogged. I keep very, very little locally - any big files go to Dropbox.

If I'm not working on stuff like that, I'm busy with Reader, forums or blogs. I stream a lot of tv. With some movies or tv shows I might well be writing or lightly reading at the same time.

I chose 70% as a rough estimate, but the replies from

innerbrat and

marrog apply to me too.
Also, if I were (as I hope one day to be) self-employed rather than working from an office, I'd use a feed-reader app and email client rather than Google Reader and Gmail, at which point my use of a web browser would drop to maybe 2% rather than 70%

I actually really like Google Reader. I'm not sure what a local reader would give me that it doesn't.

I'll be sticking with Thunderbird though.

I answered under the assumptions of:
* Discounting my work PC, even though I do a number of non-work webby things from it (such as writing this answer :P )
* Discounting any work-from-home on my home PC
* Counting time in a web browser pointed at my local web server, which would (and does) work just as well without a physical internet connection (A lot of my leisure time is spent developing a webapp at the moment, so I test it in a browser pointed at http://localhost:3000/ ...)
* Discounting the very frequent "mail checks" that I do by glancing at the tab titles of my always-open web browser while I'm doing something else

I don't have the issue that some other commenters have of "I'm doing lots of things at once" - I don't do much IM, don't listen to web music, and I only use Skype while I'm also playing Starcraft II.

Given all that, the largeish categories my time divides into:
* Reading (web)mail, chatting with friends via the ToothyChat Ajax client, reading LJ and links from it, etc - yes
* Developing the webapp in text editor and command line - no
* Developing the webapp in localhost browser - yes
* Playing games - mostly no, but yes for flash games
* Watching video - mostly no
* Research on the web - yes
Probably adds up to about 70%.

See, that's the kind of analysis I like!

Normally my answer would be "100%", as I always always have a browser window open. However, right at the moment half my computer time is at placement, where I'm using my netbook offline. It's weird.

I decided that plugging the laptop into the plasma TV to watch torrented TV doesn't count as 'at my personal computer'.

I have MS Office at home because it is fairly cheap, and the price is worth my sanity - using something that is similar to but different from Excel (which I use 70% of my time at work) is awful. My most common use for MS Word is adding style tags to txt files before converting to epub. Most common use for MS Excel is roleplaying related.

I'm such a weirdo that I type up all the recipes I ever use in a Word document, and I type my grocery list in Excel so that I can calculate cost per 100g or per 100ml of things more easily.

Sometimes, I spend a lot of time at the computer playing games. Especially when certain people point me at a 10p DL of a game I quite like.

But mostly, I spend 90%+ of my time on the laptop online. FWIW, mostly when I'm reading Docs and similar, they get emailed to me, so they get opened in Google Docs.

I read spreadsheets in OO, but that's because I tend to want to do weird sutff and the screen on the netbook is too small to use Google Docs effectively.

90% of the stuff I don't use the web for I could use the web for, or live without. I wouldn't want to, mind, but I could easily.

If I were buying a spare laptop, or one to travel with designed to be online pretty much the whole time, then ChromeOS would be something I'd consider if it was cheap.

I don't use Open Office Writer or similar more than a handful of times a year, but I do frequently use gedit to type things up in. I don't know if that counts under your schema - it's something I definitely prefer to use a desktop-based programme for rather than over the internet, but it's not a full-blown word processor.

I use gedit for drafting things and then they go on the web. Gedit is also pretty much the only non-web think I use on my netbook.

You're the second person to have mentioned Gedit. I use Textpad at work for similar things, because we have a site license, and I don't need anything more complex. Sometimes text-editors are exactly what you need.

How should I budget my time if I'm browsing the web with my computer and playing music at the same time with a non web application?

I am assuming you will accept vim as a "word processor" since I use it for everything most people would use Word or its ilk for.

If you're using it to write letters, it counts :->

I use notepad every day for taking notes and storing emails and stuff, both at work and personal time. I didn't count that under "word processors". In my personal time, I only use the fancier word processors if I want to print something out in a nice format. There are other editors I also use, depending on what I need to do (column formatting, macros, etc). I'm similar to a couple of other people, that even when I'm using non-web programs, I generally have a bunch of web pages open at the same time, and switch between them.

I would be interested in seeing how this differed if you split things up into "consumption" and "production" activities.

For me, if I am creating anything of almost any sort, be it email, chat messages, code, images, documents or whatever, then I'm doing so using non-web applications.

On the other hand, if I'm just reading or watching stuff, then these days that's almost entirely on the web for me, although I do an increasing amount of it through a local RSS reader (which is a bit of a grey area, since it essentially incorporates a browser).

Yeah - that sounds about right.

Although I use Google Reader, and don't miss anything from the RSS apps I used to use. I prefer Thunderbird to the GMail interface though.

The performance issue with local apps vs web apps could I assume be mostly solved by having your own local server for any web apps that would be too slow through the internet. Which would solve security issues too. Assuming ChromeOS will allow this, of course... You'd be back to maintaining your own software though. (One of the things web-apps make redundant.)

I have to say, I prefer tabs to windows. My ideal would be a tabbed browser that allows split views.

Chrome is just the minimum OS necessary to host the Chrome browser - so you can go to any website with it.

What do you mean by split views?

Have the browser window split so you can view two or more webpages side by side, or above and below each other, etc. No doubt some browsers already allow this, and I thought Opera did, but I can't find the option if it does. You need to be able to look at one page while working in another, and that'd be a more elegant way to do it than by having two windows open.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4287/ will do it for Firefox. I've never used Opera for long enough to find the power user stuff.

Unfortunately it doesn't work for me. So I tried Tile Tabs which seems to do much the same thing, but it didn't work either! With both addons I noticed I couldn't open new windows after they were enabled, so I assume I've some setting set that stuffs them up equally. Can't think what though.

Found the problem - it's my virus-checker's extension that's not compatible with them. Remove it and Tile Tabs works, at least, as I'm sure Fox Splitter would.

Stop! Web Time!

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web appliance/internet appliance

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