Re: nobody has a use for this

None of us is really familiar with all of the general public. We all interact with just a biased specimen of it. However, I would have thought there must be quite a lot of people who would be happy with just a browser. Consider the following person, for example. Outside work she uses a computer only for the web browser (shopping, Google Mail, ...). When she's working at home she has to use various Microsoft apps, but neither her current employer nor her previous employer would allow her move documents off their server, so she has to work online with her PC acting as a terminal. With her previous job she used Cisco Terminal Server, I think it was: it worked fine on my Linux box. With her current job she uses some kind of Java-based thing that runs within the browser: it would probably run on Linux, though I've not tried it.

Needing a network connection is a disadvantage, it's true. But being able to work from several different computers and knowing that you have lost no data whatsoever if your computer catches fire or is stolen is a significant advantage.

The work she does involves spreading out confidential paper documents over a reasonably large table. She couldn't work on an aeroplane even if she did have to fly, which she doesn't.