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The web is like an operating system that you are locked into using. This prevents alternative operating systems such as Plan 9 from ever becoming useful, becaus

The web is like an operating system that you are locked into using. This prevents alternative operating systems such as Plan 9 from ever becoming useful, because building a web browser is such a monumental effort. Even if a decent web browser were built for Plan 9 it would defeat the purpose of using such an alternative OS because the web binds software to content. The web has effectively killed innovation in operating systems. A clean and consistent system will be out of reach as long as this web app nonsense continues.

foota 10y ago
I disagree, while writing a web browser would be significant work, it would likely be on the same order as writing an operating functional enough for people to actually want to use it. Porting a browser would likely take less work even (while still being a significant amount of work). This page talks about what it takes to port webkit to another platform: http://blog.cranksoftware.com/webkit-porting-tips-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ http://blog.cranksoftware.com/webkit-porting-tips-the-good-t...
- pointfree 10y ago
  Sure you could port webkit to your new OS, but if all the software you use effectively exists only as web apps what would be the point?
  - anw 10y ago
    The point seems to be you could now use any system you wanted (as long as there is a compliant browser) and not worry if your needed app is supported or has all the features of the Windows/OSX version. This lets you take advantage of whatever benefits your desired system provides you without a change of user experience.
  - foota 10y ago
    I think I understand your argument now. Why do you think browsers as de factor operating systems is wrong? Their programming interface is highly standardized across implementations.
    - pointfree 10y ago
      > Their programming interface is highly standardized across implementations. It may be easier to have everyone use the same software and hardware platform everywhere. After all we do want interoperability and we do want everyone to play well with others, but, standardization and portability is a push to stop people from trying new things. The push to standardize everything is an unfortunate consequence of not having a separation of concerns, separate concerns such as content and UI.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Not sure what you mean by standardization vs. exploratory programming. Separation of concerns would only exist if standardized (and enforced).
        pointfree 10y ago
        A smaller contact area between implementations means we need only be concerned about compatibility at that interface and the rest is up to you. This keeps the area of software that we can't change to a minimum.
- stonogo 10y ago
  Forgive me, but you should more specifically define the terms you use. As it stands, it looks like by "functional enough for people to actually want to use it" you seem to introduce a circular dependency -- as though an OS is useless unless it's easy to port a browser to it. The GP post mentiones Plan 9, which is a great example here. There are real people who use Plan 9 every day (I have met some of them!) but Webkit will never be portable to that OS because there is no C++ compiler. This doesn't make the OS non-functional, but it does mean step one to porting a modern browser is "port GCC or LLVM," which is a massive task by itself. Both Firefox and Chrome source code repositories are in the hundreds of megabytes, even without the required host OS dependencies vendored in. The document you linked to recommends leveraging freetype, cairo, and all kinds of other things that would require serious graphics infrastructure of a sort that's just not feasible. Modern web browsers are keystones that cap off arches built of hundreds of pieces of very specific software. As time goes by, they require more infrastructure, not less -- c.f. Firefox, where to build the latest version you must also have a Rust compiler that targets your operating system. As the checklist of requirements grows ever longer, the candidate operating systems capable of meeting those requirements grows ever shorter. Five years from now, I predict the only three operating systems capable of interacting with the web in any meaningful sense will be linux, macos, and windows; bsd and haiku et al will have been left by the wayside. Ten years from now I predict there will be four operating systems, and one of them will be Fuchsia, because only a megacorp like Google has the resources to accomplish that.
  - rhabarba 10y ago
    Don't forget that browsers like Netsurf might well be enough for your daily surfing.
  - buzzybee 10y ago
    One intriguing direction we could take is for someone to make a self-hosting browser. Doing that would mean taking all these technology dependencies and moving as many as possible into wasm, until you're just left with the kernel, a "barebones" wasm runtime, and a browser binary. I think that is within the reach of one of the big-leaguers, albeit ambitious and full of "interesting" problems and standards that will have to be broken.
- adrianN 10y ago
  I'm no expert, but I believe the difficulty in writing an OS lies with the myriad of different hardware configurations you have to support. Writing drivers for poorly documented hardware is difficult. You don't get around that complexity by writing a browser. That's just an additional effort you have to make.
pnathan 10y ago
The web is a bad reinvention of distributed RPCs on desktop systems, imo.
- rimliu 10y ago
  You mean web apps? Because the web itself was fine till everyone started thinking that anything on the web must be an application. And that web must "win" mobile for some reason.
  - oblio 10y ago
    You'll understand that "some reason" when you'll want some cool, fancy, useful app and the vendor will have not developed a version for your current mobile OS.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Few of web apps are useful, though, and all suffer severe performance and UX penalty by the very virtue of being run within a browser.
      - oblio 10y ago
        Few of any kind of apps are useful. The non-purists (which is most people) have decided that availability trumps everything. I was more of a purist, myself, but after some bad experiences with the lack of native apps, I'm more of a realist these days.
  - pnathan 10y ago
    Web apps have been the default approach for over a decade now. The O.G. vision of the web / netscape was to have a virtual OS, platform independent. I think it's time to lay the idea of the webapp as somehow being this alien thing to rest...
- rhabarba 10y ago
  The web is a broken and incomplete adaption of Xanadu.
lifthrasiir 10y ago
In my view the web is a very successful demonstration of language-based security in the OS. It's quite natural that the web has essentially became a full-featured (and half-baked) operating system because it has to handle everything in order to keep the language-based security and relevance. Therefore I would argue that the innovation in operating systems has not been killed---it has been shifted to the different realm.
7373737373 10y ago
Web desktops may be the next step. As much as people are joking about running Javascript on metal, the idea of running a universally accepted virtual machine (WebAssembly?) and building a high level language and operating system on top of it seems to have some merit. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) http://urbit.org/docs/ http://urbit.org/docs/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_desktop
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  the idea of a web desktop doesn't make sense when we have services like google docs and dropbox that perform the roles of the desktop without the overhead of installing software. The desktop was a forced requirement while content had to be centralised on your PC, why bother with it now that we're freed from that constraint?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > The desktop was a forced requirement while content had to be centralised on your PC, why bother with it now that we're freed from that constraint? Because some of us want content to be centralized on our PCs. We want to own our data, instead of giving it away and then renting back access to it. Related, I consider the push towards abstracting away the file system to be a very bad thing.
    - beaconstudios 10y ago
      I agree with you completely, especially given all the revelations that have come out about dragnet surveillance, but the OP was talking about web desktops specifically.
  - 7373737373 10y ago
    It's all about namespaces. You can access local files the same way you access web resources and vice versa.
- 10y ago
jlebrech 10y ago
compile a linux desktop to the web (webassembler/jslinux), style your gui to look like your brand, users are logged into x11/wayland as guest by default. logging in looks like you're on a website but in fact you're in a linux session. you code your apps in gtk/kde (whatever) and html/xml (or something more sane) is only used for the layout of those apps.
glangdale 10y ago
I think this is the wrong way around; Plan 9 prevented itself from becoming useful by changing everything so thoroughly that building an actual web browser was pretty much impossible. It was more or less guaranteed that APE (The "ANSI Posix Environment") would die from neglect. This neglect seemed intentional and people seemed happy to run plain white windows with black borders and congratulate themselves that their system neither had nor needed the massive shared libraries that Unixen of the time seemed to need. The lesson seems to be, rather - don't build an operating system that can't build up enough infrastructure to run a browser. This is maybe less forbidding than, say, being forced to build an operating system that can support an entire Windows subsystem. I have trouble understanding what it is that people want when they say they want "innovation" in operating systems. It seems like almost anything that was practical to do in the period when I worked with Plan 9 is now eminently practical and far more performant in user space; so why not go build it on top of a minimal Linux kernel and save yourself the trouble of building a gazillion drivers, boot loaders, etc.
oblio 10y ago
Have you ever thought about the fact that most people don't like innovation and don't need it? They want and need well tested incremental updates to proven technologies. There is still innovation happening in operating systems, it just doesn't reach mass adoption because most of it doesn't provide real-life benefits to the mass market. Some of the more practical aspects trickle down to mainstream OSes. We're past the Wild West stage of operating systems. You win some, you lose some.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  http://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/jpatos19&section=123 http://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.jo... This is the paper Isaac Asimov researched as an undergrad, and was the basis of his first sci-fi story sold. There's a lot of material on this topic. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resistance+to+technological+innovation&t=ftas&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resistance+to+technological+innova...
simonh 10y ago
> A clean and consistent system will be out of reach as long as this web app nonsense continues. Isn't that exactly what iOS and Android are though? I mean most of the criticisms of iOS are against Apple's obsessive curation of it's simplicity and usability, and it 'came to power' smack in the middle of the internet age. People are always complaining that native apps for internet services are a threat to the web. It seems to be exactly the thing you're saying the web makes impossible.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Dunno. Initially iPhone was not supposed to have apps at all. Apple even release a web framework for making sites that looked and behaved as if it was native to iPhone. Only after the jailbreakers enabled third parties to fool around with the guts did we see apps happen. And initially Jobs wants to sue those app devs and distributors into oblivion.
  - huxley 10y ago
    I wish that myth would die. Yes, Jobs did a song-and-dance about web apps but not because they didn't want 3rd party apps but because Apple wasn't ready to support developers on what was a new platform. Apple plays it safe. For one, it's not consistent with the timeline and secondly as the jailbreakers discovered there was quite a bit of infrastructure to support apps even in iPhone OS 1.0. * iPhone release date: June 29, 2007 * iOS SDK Announced: October 17, 2007 * iOS SDK Released: March 6, 2008 * iPhone OS 2.0 release date: July 11, 2008 Apple had such a tough time providing enough support to developers that they restricted access to the paid developer program to just 4000 (Apple said 25000 tried to join). There wasn't enough time for everything to happen (including relatively sophisticated tools like the iPhone Simulator) if it was just a reaction to jailbreaking.
    - simonh 10y ago
      Furthermore, the OS itself was initially developed for tablet computers, so apps would have been crucial. Adapting it to a Phone platform with a more limited initial scope was a fairly late stage pivot.
digi_owl 10y ago
The web, at least the part most people interact with, is more like a throwback to leased terminals. The real computation happen on a far away pile of hardware, with the local computer just being responsible for drawing the updates on screen based on the results coming over the wire.
AckSyn 10y ago
There's the web, then there are tons of other protocols out there to use on the Internet. And browsing using lynx/links/elinks is quite possible.

foota 10y ago

I disagree, while writing a web browser would be significant work, it would likely be on the same order as writing an operating functional enough for people to actually want to use it. Porting a browser would likely take less work even (while still being a significant amount of work). This page talks about what it takes to port webkit to another platform: http://blog.cranksoftware.com/webkit-porting-tips-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ http://blog.cranksoftware.com/webkit-porting-tips-the-good-t...

pointfree 10y ago
Sure you could port webkit to your new OS, but if all the software you use effectively exists only as web apps what would be the point?
- anw 10y ago
  The point seems to be you could now use any system you wanted (as long as there is a compliant browser) and not worry if your needed app is supported or has all the features of the Windows/OSX version. This lets you take advantage of whatever benefits your desired system provides you without a change of user experience.
- foota 10y ago
  I think I understand your argument now. Why do you think browsers as de factor operating systems is wrong? Their programming interface is highly standardized across implementations.
  - pointfree 10y ago
    > Their programming interface is highly standardized across implementations. It may be easier to have everyone use the same software and hardware platform everywhere. After all we do want interoperability and we do want everyone to play well with others, but, standardization and portability is a push to stop people from trying new things. The push to standardize everything is an unfortunate consequence of not having a separation of concerns, separate concerns such as content and UI.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Not sure what you mean by standardization vs. exploratory programming. Separation of concerns would only exist if standardized (and enforced).
      - pointfree 10y ago
        A smaller contact area between implementations means we need only be concerned about compatibility at that interface and the rest is up to you. This keeps the area of software that we can't change to a minimum.
stonogo 10y ago
Forgive me, but you should more specifically define the terms you use. As it stands, it looks like by "functional enough for people to actually want to use it" you seem to introduce a circular dependency -- as though an OS is useless unless it's easy to port a browser to it. The GP post mentiones Plan 9, which is a great example here. There are real people who use Plan 9 every day (I have met some of them!) but Webkit will never be portable to that OS because there is no C++ compiler. This doesn't make the OS non-functional, but it does mean step one to porting a modern browser is "port GCC or LLVM," which is a massive task by itself. Both Firefox and Chrome source code repositories are in the hundreds of megabytes, even without the required host OS dependencies vendored in. The document you linked to recommends leveraging freetype, cairo, and all kinds of other things that would require serious graphics infrastructure of a sort that's just not feasible. Modern web browsers are keystones that cap off arches built of hundreds of pieces of very specific software. As time goes by, they require more infrastructure, not less -- c.f. Firefox, where to build the latest version you must also have a Rust compiler that targets your operating system. As the checklist of requirements grows ever longer, the candidate operating systems capable of meeting those requirements grows ever shorter. Five years from now, I predict the only three operating systems capable of interacting with the web in any meaningful sense will be linux, macos, and windows; bsd and haiku et al will have been left by the wayside. Ten years from now I predict there will be four operating systems, and one of them will be Fuchsia, because only a megacorp like Google has the resources to accomplish that.
- rhabarba 10y ago
  Don't forget that browsers like Netsurf might well be enough for your daily surfing.
- buzzybee 10y ago
  One intriguing direction we could take is for someone to make a self-hosting browser. Doing that would mean taking all these technology dependencies and moving as many as possible into wasm, until you're just left with the kernel, a "barebones" wasm runtime, and a browser binary. I think that is within the reach of one of the big-leaguers, albeit ambitious and full of "interesting" problems and standards that will have to be broken.
adrianN 10y ago
I'm no expert, but I believe the difficulty in writing an OS lies with the myriad of different hardware configurations you have to support. Writing drivers for poorly documented hardware is difficult. You don't get around that complexity by writing a browser. That's just an additional effort you have to make.

pnathan 10y ago

The web is a bad reinvention of distributed RPCs on desktop systems, imo.

rimliu 10y ago
You mean web apps? Because the web itself was fine till everyone started thinking that anything on the web must be an application. And that web must "win" mobile for some reason.
- oblio 10y ago
  You'll understand that "some reason" when you'll want some cool, fancy, useful app and the vendor will have not developed a version for your current mobile OS.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Few of web apps are useful, though, and all suffer severe performance and UX penalty by the very virtue of being run within a browser.
    - oblio 10y ago
      Few of any kind of apps are useful. The non-purists (which is most people) have decided that availability trumps everything. I was more of a purist, myself, but after some bad experiences with the lack of native apps, I'm more of a realist these days.
- pnathan 10y ago
  Web apps have been the default approach for over a decade now. The O.G. vision of the web / netscape was to have a virtual OS, platform independent. I think it's time to lay the idea of the webapp as somehow being this alien thing to rest...
rhabarba 10y ago
The web is a broken and incomplete adaption of Xanadu.

lifthrasiir 10y ago

In my view the web is a very successful demonstration of language-based security in the OS. It's quite natural that the web has essentially became a full-featured (and half-baked) operating system because it has to handle everything in order to keep the language-based security and relevance. Therefore I would argue that the innovation in operating systems has not been killed---it has been shifted to the different realm.

7373737373 10y ago

Web desktops may be the next step. As much as people are joking about running Javascript on metal, the idea of running a universally accepted virtual machine (WebAssembly?) and building a high level language and operating system on top of it seems to have some merit. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) http://urbit.org/docs/ http://urbit.org/docs/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_desktop

beaconstudios 10y ago
the idea of a web desktop doesn't make sense when we have services like google docs and dropbox that perform the roles of the desktop without the overhead of installing software. The desktop was a forced requirement while content had to be centralised on your PC, why bother with it now that we're freed from that constraint?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > The desktop was a forced requirement while content had to be centralised on your PC, why bother with it now that we're freed from that constraint? Because some of us want content to be centralized on our PCs. We want to own our data, instead of giving it away and then renting back access to it. Related, I consider the push towards abstracting away the file system to be a very bad thing.
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    I agree with you completely, especially given all the revelations that have come out about dragnet surveillance, but the OP was talking about web desktops specifically.
- 7373737373 10y ago
  It's all about namespaces. You can access local files the same way you access web resources and vice versa.
10y ago

jlebrech 10y ago

compile a linux desktop to the web (webassembler/jslinux), style your gui to look like your brand, users are logged into x11/wayland as guest by default. logging in looks like you're on a website but in fact you're in a linux session. you code your apps in gtk/kde (whatever) and html/xml (or something more sane) is only used for the layout of those apps.

glangdale 10y ago

I think this is the wrong way around; Plan 9 prevented itself from becoming useful by changing everything so thoroughly that building an actual web browser was pretty much impossible. It was more or less guaranteed that APE (The "ANSI Posix Environment") would die from neglect. This neglect seemed intentional and people seemed happy to run plain white windows with black borders and congratulate themselves that their system neither had nor needed the massive shared libraries that Unixen of the time seemed to need. The lesson seems to be, rather - don't build an operating system that can't build up enough infrastructure to run a browser. This is maybe less forbidding than, say, being forced to build an operating system that can support an entire Windows subsystem. I have trouble understanding what it is that people want when they say they want "innovation" in operating systems. It seems like almost anything that was practical to do in the period when I worked with Plan 9 is now eminently practical and far more performant in user space; so why not go build it on top of a minimal Linux kernel and save yourself the trouble of building a gazillion drivers, boot loaders, etc.

oblio 10y ago

Have you ever thought about the fact that most people don't like innovation and don't need it? They want and need well tested incremental updates to proven technologies. There is still innovation happening in operating systems, it just doesn't reach mass adoption because most of it doesn't provide real-life benefits to the mass market. Some of the more practical aspects trickle down to mainstream OSes. We're past the Wild West stage of operating systems. You win some, you lose some.

dredmorbius 10y ago
http://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/jpatos19&section=123 http://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.jo... This is the paper Isaac Asimov researched as an undergrad, and was the basis of his first sci-fi story sold. There's a lot of material on this topic. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resistance+to+technological+innovation&t=ftas&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resistance+to+technological+innova...

simonh 10y ago

> A clean and consistent system will be out of reach as long as this web app nonsense continues. Isn't that exactly what iOS and Android are though? I mean most of the criticisms of iOS are against Apple's obsessive curation of it's simplicity and usability, and it 'came to power' smack in the middle of the internet age. People are always complaining that native apps for internet services are a threat to the web. It seems to be exactly the thing you're saying the web makes impossible.

digi_owl 10y ago
Dunno. Initially iPhone was not supposed to have apps at all. Apple even release a web framework for making sites that looked and behaved as if it was native to iPhone. Only after the jailbreakers enabled third parties to fool around with the guts did we see apps happen. And initially Jobs wants to sue those app devs and distributors into oblivion.
- huxley 10y ago
  I wish that myth would die. Yes, Jobs did a song-and-dance about web apps but not because they didn't want 3rd party apps but because Apple wasn't ready to support developers on what was a new platform. Apple plays it safe. For one, it's not consistent with the timeline and secondly as the jailbreakers discovered there was quite a bit of infrastructure to support apps even in iPhone OS 1.0. * iPhone release date: June 29, 2007 * iOS SDK Announced: October 17, 2007 * iOS SDK Released: March 6, 2008 * iPhone OS 2.0 release date: July 11, 2008 Apple had such a tough time providing enough support to developers that they restricted access to the paid developer program to just 4000 (Apple said 25000 tried to join). There wasn't enough time for everything to happen (including relatively sophisticated tools like the iPhone Simulator) if it was just a reaction to jailbreaking.
  - simonh 10y ago
    Furthermore, the OS itself was initially developed for tablet computers, so apps would have been crucial. Adapting it to a Phone platform with a more limited initial scope was a fairly late stage pivot.

digi_owl 10y ago

The web, at least the part most people interact with, is more like a throwback to leased terminals. The real computation happen on a far away pile of hardware, with the local computer just being responsible for drawing the updates on screen based on the results coming over the wire.

AckSyn 10y ago

There's the web, then there are tons of other protocols out there to use on the Internet. And browsing using lynx/links/elinks is quite possible.