4 ms·

Maybe the next step of the "web" is just to fully embrace the browser as an app VM. Have one standard for reading Wikipedia, and another for running Figma in th

Maybe the next step of the "web" is just to fully embrace the browser as an app VM. Have one standard for reading Wikipedia, and another for running Figma in the browser. WASM + some common simple widget-esque API (like a small subset of Cocoa/GTK/QT). The browser provide implementations of some functionality like text-rendering and event handling, but then it's up to developer/frameworks to solve everything else.

phtrivier 6y ago
I would argue that the web browser evolved, by accident, into the closest thing we have to a portable and usable desktop OS. However, to me the browser is more like a "requirement statement", than a solution. The success of the web is just a symptom that: - users want applications that work on computers. Win vs Mac vs Linux vs Mobile vs ... is all nice and well for us geeks, but to real-world people, it's just a frigging computer. For some reason, OS vendors were never able to agree on anything substantial, but browser vendors did. We need a W3C for OSes. (Except, maybe one with a constitution, a parliament, a police force and a tax enforcement agency.) They have to decide an OS-level API. They will probably fight over which programming language to use to write applications, but whatever they decide, someone will write a brainfuck compiler frontend for it, anyway, and it will not matter. - users want to use applications, not spend hours installing them. The browser got that right by accident, by using reflection and stringly-typing ; you 'install an application' by 'sharing a bit line of text that you can copy paste in an email', and you 'find an application' by typing a name in Google. The browser stopped short of getting anything else right about application, feverishly waiting for someone to solve "librairies" for them by just downloading 100 versions of jquery and praying. The OSes of the future will need interoperable, discoverable, namespaced apps, with namespaced, signed, shared libraries. - users want applications with GUIs. And pretty much all applications will want to display the same basic suff that has been known since Smalltalk. (And the users don't really give a damn that the Facebook buttons do not look exactly the same as the Twitter buttons.) The OSes of the future will need a standard way to draw the Smalltalk-level UIs. And easily make the same application with a different logo on it, because the customer wanted Facebook, but more yellow. - also, users wants games that just take all the screen and they could not give a damn about the buttons in the game, they want to play. And it should be fast. The OSes of the future will need a standard way to use GPUs. And, really, nothing else. The game devs don't really want an OS, actually. Ask Casey Muratori. Let the game devs do whatever they want with the computer, they know better than you, and will write semi-portable machine code (aka C) anyway. Your "browser" thingy would makes them laugh hard if they had the time to laugh while peeing in a jar to finish their next version of CoD. - and users have a computer to do things with other people, so of course networking. What do you mean there are computers without networking ? The OSes of the future will need networking. But since the people who designed ethernet and Internet and TCP/IP and routers etc... were border-line geniuses with infinite vision (apparently they were high on LSD most of the time), people will just use TCP/IP to communicate with our cousins of Mars. But we'll have to come up with something better HTTP. And JSON. And if we could let the OS handle network identity management ? So that all applications don't have to speed the first six months of development on the "login" page ? Yes I know it's hard, but it's harder when it's not the right part of the computer doing it. - and some, a tiny little portion of some users want to use computers to read the news. So, yeah, of course the OS would have shareable document reader. And those documents might very well be HTML (although, we all know that we need better.) And the New York Times would build a "smalltalk-like app" to organise columns and images and typography and whatnot on an infinite canvas, and sometimes, display the text of an Op-ed - rather than turning the text of an Op-Ed into a weird tree of DOM elements, and have a poor soul come up with 1000 lines of CSS that do the work of 10 lines of code. Of course it will not happen, but it was nice to imagine that.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  This is all pretty similar to what I've been imagining my ideal computing environment might look like. -Applications as single-objects that are stored and manipulated the same as any other file -Components (applications) compiled to some trivial-to-implement bytecode[0] as well as native -User-malleable UIs where components are tied together with events, message passing, and or pipelines of some kind -Public-key based network identity management -Plan9-like ability to share resources over the network trivially -Permissions applied between applications and resources instead of user and system [0] This is so that new architectures can be bootstrapped easily and have access to the vast majority of tooling immediately. Native code could be included along side the universal bytecode for all currently-supported platforms. I agree though that it is unlikely any of that will ever happen.
  - ROARosen 6y ago
    Google's Fuchsia OS is based around some of your design concepts. See: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts
  - 7373737373 6y ago
    Agreed with all of that, more links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_(operating_system) https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  The web made sharing information easy. That's it. That's all it did. Without the web, if I wanted to share information with you, I'd have to learn C, OS native GUI libraries, TCP/IP, and probably a bunch of other stuff if my information also had picture and sound. On the web, I just need HTML and I'm already a published author. What would a post-modern operating system need to do to make sharing information easy?
  - 6y ago
blueblisters 6y ago
10 years ago if you had pitched this idea to Steve Jobs, he might have embraced it and pushed for a cross-platform app container standard that can run productivity apps, games and more. Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone. We already do. Apple doesn’t take a cut of things you purchase in the browser. Nor do they take a cut of in-app purchases when it’s not consumed on the device for that matter.
  - nwienert 6y ago
    And in turn they cripple the web on their devices so they can’t compete with apps.
    - robgibbons 6y ago
      This is by far my biggest gripe with Apple. Almost everything else they do can be justified by some mental gymnastics, but their suppression of the web on iOS is something I can't forgive. The size of their user base demands that we don't ignore Safari when developing sites, but they simultaneously refuse to support modern standards. They are literally holding back the web.
    - bbatha 6y ago
      And yet many of us prefer safari because of its incredible battery life and low overhead. The safari is the new ie meme is seriously overblown and only affects app developers trying to use the absolutely newest features and is more tied to safaris year long release cadence than actual malice. Not that there arent a few notable exceptions to apis that should have been implemented long ago.
      - 6y ago

phtrivier 6y ago

I would argue that the web browser evolved, by accident, into the closest thing we have to a portable and usable desktop OS. However, to me the browser is more like a "requirement statement", than a solution. The success of the web is just a symptom that: - users want applications that work on computers. Win vs Mac vs Linux vs Mobile vs ... is all nice and well for us geeks, but to real-world people, it's just a frigging computer. For some reason, OS vendors were never able to agree on anything substantial, but browser vendors did. We need a W3C for OSes. (Except, maybe one with a constitution, a parliament, a police force and a tax enforcement agency.) They have to decide an OS-level API. They will probably fight over which programming language to use to write applications, but whatever they decide, someone will write a brainfuck compiler frontend for it, anyway, and it will not matter. - users want to use applications, not spend hours installing them. The browser got that right by accident, by using reflection and stringly-typing ; you 'install an application' by 'sharing a bit line of text that you can copy paste in an email', and you 'find an application' by typing a name in Google. The browser stopped short of getting anything else right about application, feverishly waiting for someone to solve "librairies" for them by just downloading 100 versions of jquery and praying. The OSes of the future will need interoperable, discoverable, namespaced apps, with namespaced, signed, shared libraries. - users want applications with GUIs. And pretty much all applications will want to display the same basic suff that has been known since Smalltalk. (And the users don't really give a damn that the Facebook buttons do not look exactly the same as the Twitter buttons.) The OSes of the future will need a standard way to draw the Smalltalk-level UIs. And easily make the same application with a different logo on it, because the customer wanted Facebook, but more yellow. - also, users wants games that just take all the screen and they could not give a damn about the buttons in the game, they want to play. And it should be fast. The OSes of the future will need a standard way to use GPUs. And, really, nothing else. The game devs don't really want an OS, actually. Ask Casey Muratori. Let the game devs do whatever they want with the computer, they know better than you, and will write semi-portable machine code (aka C) anyway. Your "browser" thingy would makes them laugh hard if they had the time to laugh while peeing in a jar to finish their next version of CoD. - and users have a computer to do things with other people, so of course networking. What do you mean there are computers without networking ? The OSes of the future will need networking. But since the people who designed ethernet and Internet and TCP/IP and routers etc... were border-line geniuses with infinite vision (apparently they were high on LSD most of the time), people will just use TCP/IP to communicate with our cousins of Mars. But we'll have to come up with something better HTTP. And JSON. And if we could let the OS handle network identity management ? So that all applications don't have to speed the first six months of development on the "login" page ? Yes I know it's hard, but it's harder when it's not the right part of the computer doing it. - and some, a tiny little portion of some users want to use computers to read the news. So, yeah, of course the OS would have shareable document reader. And those documents might very well be HTML (although, we all know that we need better.) And the New York Times would build a "smalltalk-like app" to organise columns and images and typography and whatnot on an infinite canvas, and sometimes, display the text of an Op-ed - rather than turning the text of an Op-Ed into a weird tree of DOM elements, and have a poor soul come up with 1000 lines of CSS that do the work of 10 lines of code. Of course it will not happen, but it was nice to imagine that.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
This is all pretty similar to what I've been imagining my ideal computing environment might look like. -Applications as single-objects that are stored and manipulated the same as any other file -Components (applications) compiled to some trivial-to-implement bytecode[0] as well as native -User-malleable UIs where components are tied together with events, message passing, and or pipelines of some kind -Public-key based network identity management -Plan9-like ability to share resources over the network trivially -Permissions applied between applications and resources instead of user and system [0] This is so that new architectures can be bootstrapped easily and have access to the vast majority of tooling immediately. Native code could be included along side the universal bytecode for all currently-supported platforms. I agree though that it is unlikely any of that will ever happen.
- ROARosen 6y ago
  Google's Fuchsia OS is based around some of your design concepts. See: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts
- 7373737373 6y ago
  Agreed with all of that, more links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_(operating_system) https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41
hypertele-Xii 6y ago
The web made sharing information easy. That's it. That's all it did. Without the web, if I wanted to share information with you, I'd have to learn C, OS native GUI libraries, TCP/IP, and probably a bunch of other stuff if my information also had picture and sound. On the web, I just need HTML and I'm already a published author. What would a post-modern operating system need to do to make sharing information easy?
- 6y ago

blueblisters 6y ago

10 years ago if you had pitched this idea to Steve Jobs, he might have embraced it and pushed for a cross-platform app container standard that can run productivity apps, games and more. Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone.

kortilla 6y ago
> Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone. We already do. Apple doesn’t take a cut of things you purchase in the browser. Nor do they take a cut of in-app purchases when it’s not consumed on the device for that matter.
- nwienert 6y ago
  And in turn they cripple the web on their devices so they can’t compete with apps.
  - robgibbons 6y ago
    This is by far my biggest gripe with Apple. Almost everything else they do can be justified by some mental gymnastics, but their suppression of the web on iOS is something I can't forgive. The size of their user base demands that we don't ignore Safari when developing sites, but they simultaneously refuse to support modern standards. They are literally holding back the web.
  - bbatha 6y ago
    And yet many of us prefer safari because of its incredible battery life and low overhead. The safari is the new ie meme is seriously overblown and only affects app developers trying to use the absolutely newest features and is more tied to safaris year long release cadence than actual malice. Not that there arent a few notable exceptions to apis that should have been implemented long ago.
    - 6y ago