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The original announcement that Netscape would release Mozilla as open source included some FAQs, including one question along the lines of "are you going to rel

The original announcement that Netscape would release Mozilla as open source included some FAQs, including one question along the lines of "are you going to release your own operating system?" The answer was that there was no good reason to build an operating system on a browser. If only they had remembered that!

mevile 10y ago
> The answer was that there was no good reason to build an operating system on a browser. Because Chromebooks are such a failure right.
- BoysenberryPi 10y ago
  Are you comparing the web now to the web then? I would even argue that Chromebooks are a pretty big flop.
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    By what metric?
    - BoysenberryPi 10y ago
      Chromebooks are successful as school computers, children's laptops and literally nothing else. If that was the goal then great but I've never seen someone who wasn't under 14 or a student using one.
- maxlybbert 10y ago
  Maybe it's where I live, but I can only remember seeing one Chromebook, and that was years ago. The fact that many people believed the dream -- including myself twenty years ago -- doesn't make the dream any more realistic. Eventually, people notice that they would like to do more things than their browser allows them to. So, yes it is true that people have been willing to migrate to cheaper, limited computers (but mainly tablets and phones; not tiny laptops). But those computers are not generally modeled after using the browser for everything.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  They are, for those of us that live outside US. I might have seen around 5 total, on sale across European consumer stores, since they exist.
bastawhiz 10y ago
WebOS was hardly a failure from a technical perspective.
maxlybbert 10y ago
I found it ( http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/mozilla-faq.html http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/mozilla-faq.html ), question 4.1: "4.1) How about a Mozilla Operating System? "Mozilla is positioned well as an application software. However, it makes very little sense to try to make Mozilla into an operating [system], almost as little sense as it would to make a Word Processor or a MP3 player into one. Beyond technical reasons, the operating system market is currently glutted, and a new entry would be unlikely to attract enough users to ensure the writing of drivers for a new system, a critical mass point. People who want to work on an operating system no doubt would be welcomed by the BSD teams, the Linux team, the Freedows team, or any of the many other open source operating system groups out there." That analysis appears to have applied to webOS just as clearly as it had applied to the desktop and laptop market a decade earlier. And just to twist the knife a little more, the last sentence in the answer to 4.2 is "Reinvention of the wheel is a poor use of volunteers."
deleted 10y ago
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gcp 10y ago
Of course nothing whatsoever changed in the web ecosystem since 1998.

mevile 10y ago

> The answer was that there was no good reason to build an operating system on a browser. Because Chromebooks are such a failure right.

BoysenberryPi 10y ago
Are you comparing the web now to the web then? I would even argue that Chromebooks are a pretty big flop.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  By what metric?
  - BoysenberryPi 10y ago
    Chromebooks are successful as school computers, children's laptops and literally nothing else. If that was the goal then great but I've never seen someone who wasn't under 14 or a student using one.
maxlybbert 10y ago
Maybe it's where I live, but I can only remember seeing one Chromebook, and that was years ago. The fact that many people believed the dream -- including myself twenty years ago -- doesn't make the dream any more realistic. Eventually, people notice that they would like to do more things than their browser allows them to. So, yes it is true that people have been willing to migrate to cheaper, limited computers (but mainly tablets and phones; not tiny laptops). But those computers are not generally modeled after using the browser for everything.
pjmlp 10y ago
They are, for those of us that live outside US. I might have seen around 5 total, on sale across European consumer stores, since they exist.

bastawhiz 10y ago

WebOS was hardly a failure from a technical perspective.

maxlybbert 10y ago

I found it ( http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/mozilla-faq.html http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/mozilla-faq.html ), question 4.1: "4.1) How about a Mozilla Operating System? "Mozilla is positioned well as an application software. However, it makes very little sense to try to make Mozilla into an operating [system], almost as little sense as it would to make a Word Processor or a MP3 player into one. Beyond technical reasons, the operating system market is currently glutted, and a new entry would be unlikely to attract enough users to ensure the writing of drivers for a new system, a critical mass point. People who want to work on an operating system no doubt would be welcomed by the BSD teams, the Linux team, the Freedows team, or any of the many other open source operating system groups out there." That analysis appears to have applied to webOS just as clearly as it had applied to the desktop and laptop market a decade earlier. And just to twist the knife a little more, the last sentence in the answer to 4.2 is "Reinvention of the wheel is a poor use of volunteers."

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gcp 10y ago

Of course nothing whatsoever changed in the web ecosystem since 1998.