90% of what people do now is done within a web browser?

I was debating with a friend the merit of a Chromebook (it's really debate for the sake of debate 'coz both of us are not inclined to buy one) I think there's a market for Chromebook because a lot can be done inside a browser these days. It has been more than a decade after Larry Ellison was pitching his concept of "Network Computing" that depends on technology like Java Applet. With today's JavaScript-based technology you could provide very rich UI in your Web apps. Then the next day I read this article "Six things that make open source a no-brainer for your company" The author wrote

90% of what people do now is done within a web browser. Let's face it, most end users today could get by with a Chromebook and still be able to get their jobs done.

If you scroll down to the comment section, you would see two comments are against this point. One said the author lacked stats to back up this argument. (One actually said "browser is a bad terminal" but he agreed he was old-school so let's leave him alone) I gave this some thought and I think we could come up with a list of what people usually do with their computer and decide whether 90% of the list could be done in a web browser! Here is the list on the top of my head:
- social networking
- web browsing (duh!)
- messaging
- office productivity (word processing/spreadsheet/presentation)
- media consumption (browsing photo, streaming music and video)
- media editing (picture/audio/video)

A web browser can certainly handle the Top 5. In fact, Google Doc is so convenient that I'd rather use it than M$ Office. The last one is debatable: for simple manipulation like making a collage of pictures, applying a filter, trimming a video or adding a sound track, web apps are good enough. What a browser cannot handle are the more sophisticated tasks like decoding a DVD or multi-track recording. So I think it's fair to say it's 25% capable for the last task. 5.25/6 = 87.5% which rounds up to 90! (In fact, if you just consider the time one typically spent on these tasks, it's certainly > 90% within a web browser!)

As a side note, even though I am no fan of Chromebook, I can't deny it's a successful product. From this article:

Amit Singh, the president of Google for Work, discussed the vision of Chrome for work and said that Chromebooks are the number one selling device on Amazon and number one selling device for education as well.

And this is from a non-Google source: Top 3 holiday computers sold by Amazon were Chromebooks.