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You can use Colab to perform many tasks, but for the purpose of this book, you use it to write and run code, create its associated documentation, and display graphics. The downloadable source for this book is designed to run on Colab, but you can also use it with Jupyter Notebook if you want.

Jupyter Notebook is a localized application in that you use local resources with it. You could potentially use other sources, but doing so could prove inconvenient or impossible in some cases. For example, according to https://docs.github.com/repositories/working-with-files/using-files/working-with-non-code-files, your Notebook files will appear as static HTML pages when you use a GitHub repository (GitHub is a cloud-based storage technology specifically oriented to working with code.) In fact, some features won't work at all. Colab enables you to fully interact with your Notebook files using GitHub as a repository, and Colab supports a number of other online storage options as well, so you can regard Colab as your online partner in creating Python code.

The other reason that you really need to know about Colab is that you can use it with your alternative device. During the writing process, some of the example code was tested on an Android-based tablet (an ASUS ZenPad 3S 10). The target tablet has Chrome installed and executes the code well enough to follow the examples. All this said, you likely won’t want to try to write code using a tablet of that size — the text was incredibly small, for one thing, and the lack of a keyboard could be a problem, too. The point is that you don’t absolutely have to have a Windows, Linux, or OS X system to try the code, but the alternatives might not provide quite the performance you expect.

Google Colab generally doesn’t work with browsers other than Chrome (the browser used in this chapter), Firefox, or Safari (initial tests with Microsoft Edge have also been encouraging). In most cases, you see an error message, such as This site may not work in your browser. Please use a supported browser, and no other display if you try to start Colab in a browser that it doesn’t support. The included More Info link takes you to https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html#browsers, where you can learn more information.