When the first Chromebooks hit the market last year, they were greeted with skepticism, curiosity and some noisy debate. Which makes sense: after all, who had ever heard of an operating system based entirely on a browser? Laptops that were only usable when you had an internet connection? It was a wild, ambitious idea, to be sure, but since then, we haven’t heard much on that front save for the... 

Yesterday, Google, the world’s most important technology company set out its contempt for computing as we know it. Google declared at their I/O developer event in San Francisco that after six months in which only a prototype was available, laptops running Google’s Chrome operating system will finally go on sale in June for consumers, businesses and education. Google Chrome OS relies...