6 ms·

A Web OS? Are You Dense?

47 points by joao 18y ago

nuggien 18y ago
whatever you call it, please respect real operating systems enough NOT to call chrome an OS.
jacobscott 18y ago
The ratio of hot air to righteous anger in this rant is too high. Concrete points Dziuba makes: a) Chrome is only out for Windows b) Web applications can be more resource intensive than desktop apps Is there anyone reading Hacker News who wasn't aware of these points? With WebKit/V8/etc, Chrome essentially acts as the language runtime, so the software stack he draws doesn't even get any taller (once the browser releases for all OSes).
- iamdave 18y ago
  Well he also makes the good point that the web is pointlessly obfuscating everyday operations while balkanizing the end-user market at the same time. Average users don't care if they can publish their resume online, they just want to do it. If they use a web app, they use a web app. In the end, they just want to get things done. I think it's a solid article.
- wheels 18y ago
  The other important point, hit right up there at the front is: desktop apps aren't going away anytime soon. It's been a real ride for me coming back into the web world after about 6 years of working on enterprise and desktop apps. Everyone in the web world seems to think we're just on the cusp of everything moving over to the web. Which is pretty much what they were saying when I was working in web programming 7 years ago. To the rest of the universe, desktop apps are still mainstays of day-to-day computing and while there is a shift, it's much more gradual than people in the web business seem to assume. Amusingly, this phenomenon is not all that different from what folks working in the Linux desktop have been assuming since I got into that some 8 years ago: that this is the year of the Linux desktop. It's about to tip any day now...
  - jacobscott 18y ago
    Okay, I agree. That makes three facts everyone knows to go with the three mspaint drawings. I appreciate ted's snark, I just wanted something compelling enough to get riled up in agreement.
    - wheels 18y ago
      Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere? This seems obvious to me, but I've gotten into a number of arguments with folks on it. There seems to be a certain fervor and excitement about "web 2.0" that people seem to get carried away in forecasting its implications. For me this is kind of amusing, since I've been tracking networking stuff through a couple decades of "thin client" fads. "The network is the computer" is hardly a new idea. :-) Usually when I want to be really productive on my computer, the first thing I do is unplug the DSL router. :-)
      - nostrademons 18y ago
        > Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere? When I worked at a company doing enterprise financial software, I got the distinct impression that it was virtually impossible to sell a new desktop app. Our customers wanted everything to be web-based. I was hired as a desktop app developer and got switched over to web development after 8 months because all our new products were web-based. I suspect that we'll see something similar to what happened with PCs and mainframes. The PC didn't kill the mainframe - all the old apps that used to run on mainframes still ran on mainframes. However, all new software, the category-killers that created new markets, were all developed on the PC. Mainframes stuck around for years before finally being killed by Y2K and web-based intranet apps, and some are still working. Similarly, I think any attempt to displace office suites and such on the web is a losing battle. PC-based apps are "good enough" for what they're used for. But virtually all new killer apps, the ones with exciting market opportunities, will be on the web. Or they'll be web/desktop hybrids like DropBox, RescueTime, or BitTorrent, in cases where the app needs some local data that the browser can't provide. Then PC apps will finally be killed by whatever new thick client ends up replacing the web, but we've got a while (maybe 10-20 years) before that happens.
- jules 18y ago
  The stack doesn't get taller, but it does get much slower. Javascript just isn't a good VM "bytecode". And HTML isn't a good graphics API.
  - philf 18y ago
    V8 actually compiles JS to native code.
    - jules 18y ago
      And it's still orders of magnitude slower than native applications.
      - qwph 18y ago
        Can you publish the results that this assertion is based on please?
        orib 18y ago
        Google is failing me now and I've got class in the morning, but you can find benchmarks comparing Lua-JIT and V8, and Lua-JIT beats V8. Lua-JIT is quite a bit slower than native code. Depending on what you're doing/benchmarking it seems to generally be between 5 to 10 times slower.
        jules 18y ago
        http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/ http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/ Chrome isn't much faster than the others.
kajecounterhack 18y ago
I think he needs to make one thing clear: CHROME IS A BROWSER. http://xkcd.com/198/ http://xkcd.com/198/
collint 18y ago
The argument about percentage for use/knowledge of web-based office apps does not support the article. To clarify, I'll put another app's name in the same percentage. There was a time when 73% of Americans had never even heard of Youtube. As long as more than 73% of Americans have heard of Youtube this statement is quite likely true. While Youtube clearly had a wonderful growth curve, both are horribly useless statements. Just as the knowledge of Youtube was low until it became high, knowledge of Google Docs will be low until it becomes high. Or it could stay low forever. But the current percentage/growth rate doesn't actually mean anything.
jrockway 18y ago
I don't think that desktop apps are going anywhere -- but web apps are going to look a lot more like desktop apps very very soon. I think it's safe to say that applications written in dynamic languages (like Javascript) that communicate with the Internet regularly are going to become more common. And a lot of these apps are going to run in something like Chrome or XULRunner. A "desktop app" is a pretty simple distinction. You go to your "desktop" and load the app. From there, the app can read/write the file system, talk to the Internet, read the keyboard and mouse, communicate with special hardware devices, etc. Web apps are going to be very much like this very soon. And then there will be no difference between a web app and a desktop app.
- jbert 18y ago
  > And then there will be no difference between a web app and a desktop app. So why choose to write a "web app" in that case? What distinguishes the two - what is the defining characteristic of a web app? (One comes on a CD, one is downloaded - no) (One is written in C++, one is written in a vm-hosted language - no). Is it just that you use HTML/JS to write the app?
  - jrockway 18y ago
    One distinguishing factor is that the "authoritative" copy of the data is on "the server", not on your disk. Web apps may not have full functionality unless connected to the 'net. (Think about how apps that use Gears work now.)
    - jbert 18y ago
      That's an interesting criterion, but there are plenty of "traditional" desktop apps who keep data server side (any thin-client DB program using ODBC, subversion clients, etc). Even IMAP email clients I suppose. So is a web app "something which keeps primary data on a server, and uses the HTTP protocol to read+write it"?
- blackmac 18y ago
  I think recently desktop apps started to look much more like web apps. I believe that's the right direction, as web apps are "usually" more focused on the one thing they do best and appear less cluttered. Under the hood you might be right though - see Gears, which enables web apps to do a lot of those desktop things.
axod 18y ago
It's all in definitions. For a lot of people, the web is already their O/S, and they could easily do without windows/OSX/linux. I think we will see more machines that go that way and just have a bare bones linux o/s with chrome/firefox on top of it. Sure, desktop software will always be around, for techies and hardcore gamers, but for the average non-tech user, they don't really need desktop software, and webapps are more natural and useful for them. (Tons of advantages to them). I think some people are underestimating just how much google can throw at chrome in terms of marketing. They already have a link on google.com, and there's a ton of other ways they can promote it. I think "Windows killer" is unwarranted, but it'll most likely make windows even less relevant than it is now to most people.
sown 18y ago
I think I can understand the author's frustration. While it might be just definitions unless we are willing to divest the word operating systems of all its meaning, I think we need to be really sure that we need a web version of word. I can see some kind of apps requiring to live "in the cloud" but I don't think desktop apps need to live there.
- froo 18y ago
  we need a web version of word I thought we already had a web version of the word - "web portal" Google as far as I can tell is already essentially a "web OS" (I think they lost their rights to call themselves a just a search engine a long time ago) and Chrome is just Google's attempt to integrate their "web OS" more readily with your computer/device.
  - sown 18y ago
    I meant more like "Microsoft Word". :)
    - froo 18y ago
      Zoho Writer, Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword etc.
      - unalone 18y ago
        Yeah, but each one has pretty big flaws with it. None directly compare yet.
        froo 18y ago
        I guess that's what happens when you have 25 years of development time in a product (Word was originally released in 1983 called Multi-Tool Word) vs what... 2 for the rest?
        sown 18y ago
alaskamiller 18y ago
TechCrunch also believes that Facebook is becoming a Web OS as well.
jcromartie 18y ago
How about the multiple interrelated stacks that make up web app development? That's what's really scary. You've at least got a server OS with its own kernel, runtimes, HTTP server, database server, application server, web framework, HTTP, SQL, SSL, HMTL, CSS, JavaScript, the browser itself, jQuery or other client-side frameworks, web services, etc. etc. etc. ... It's madness!
maxklein 18y ago
This is not relevant. The layers are not really built on top of each other in that way. Windows is mostly just a collection of libraries which do important stuff. If you did not have this libraries, you'd have to write the libraries. So this is not a layer you can remove, it's an essential part of the application. Things like the Java VM are a real layer, but things like MFC (which chrome does not use, it uses WTL) do not really slow things down or act as a real layer. They compile down to the same code as if you were to do this by yourself. And anyways, what's the point? We should stop writing web apps?
startingup 18y ago
Let me list the ways that Chrome starts to encroach on the OS territory. 1. It has a fast Javascript VM, that converts Javascript into native code, cutting through lots of layers. 2. Each Javascript app (i.e a tab) runs in its own process, which the browser manages. So effectively Chrome is the OS layer as far as your JS apps is concerned. 3. The browser provides a nice control panel for managing those tasks and provides stats about its usage - again tradtionally what you wanted from an OS. 4. Chrome is not yet cross-platform, but we can expect it to be cross platform in due course. It is open source with a BSD license, so I am guessing lots of people have already started compiling it to every platform on earth. Expect unofficial distros soon. 5. Layering Chrome on top of a very stripped down Linux or BSD kernel, letting Chrome do all the GUI work is possible. Chrome does not need MFC, it is layered directly on top of a lower level graphics library (Win32). The calls Chrome needs could be done on top of BSD fairly easily. In fact, that is how Chrome (or Firefox for that matter) is really cross-platform - they come with their own widget sets (i.e MFC equivalent) rather than relying on the specific platform's widget set. Incidentally, Java does the exact same thing. 6. OEMs could come up with a 20-30 MB distribution of Chrome, with everything included (kernel, libraries, JS, Flash etc) and bundle it as a web top. So, yes, Chrome is an alternative to traditional operating systems. The fact that it would include a stripped down BSD kernel doesn't count: from the application perspective Chrome is the OS. Snark is all fine and dandy, but occasionally exercising the brain cells a little bit keeps them in good working order.
- blasdel 18y ago
  WRONG I think most of this 'WebOS' bullshit was kicked off by web-dilettante Jason Kottke, and it's even more ridiculous this time around, because Chrome is the least OS-like modern web browser yet made (and Firefox would be the most OS-like by far). Chrome is not trying to be the operating system, it's trying to get out of its way. By using a shared-nothing separate process for each tab and plugin, it's letting the Kernel and libc do the job they were designed to do. Most modern browsers (especially FF3) are trying to do an operating system's job — scheduling logically independent processes, micro-managing memory allocations, mapping virtual memory, providing an internal windowing system, providing an internal GUI scripting system. The whole point of an 'operating system' is to present a lot of layers. Chrome does none of these things. It parries them off to the real operating system, where they belong — instead of adding another five nested layers on top of the pile of indirection.
silentbicycle 18y ago
I'll call it an OS when it boots.
- pavelludiq 18y ago
  I'll call it an os when i can make toast with it: http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/08/11/toaster-pc-runs-bsd-and-makes-toast http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/08/11/toast...
- sah 18y ago
  Does Linux boot, or is that GRUB/LILO? Remember loadlin? Does that count? What about Windows XP under VirtualBox?
extension 18y ago
The once clear meaning of "operating system" has become vague with today's software stack, but that's a semantic debate. The web is undeniably an application platform and in that capacity, it is improved significantly by Chrome. The most successful web applications, social and communication apps, would likely have never existed on the desktop. There is also a broad class of desktop apps that have no forseeable migration path to the web such as rich media editing (photo/audio/video/etc) and games. Which apps will make the leap from desktop to web is a subject ripe for speculation, but it's not going to be all of them. Such hyperbolic revolutionary fantasies always go unfulfilled.
KevinMS 18y ago
You know who also thought a web browser could become a replacement for the OS? Microsoft. So much so they freaked out and ruined netscape, tried to ruin Real Media, and tried to extend and extinquish Javascript and Java, and almost got their company broken up by the government they were so worried about it. And now its back, and looking like more of a threat than ever.

47 points by joao 18y ago

whatever you call it, please respect real operating systems enough NOT to call chrome an OS.

The ratio of hot air to righteous anger in this rant is too high. Concrete points Dziuba makes: a) Chrome is only out for Windows b) Web applications can be more resource intensive than desktop apps Is there anyone reading Hacker News who wasn't aware of these points? With WebKit/V8/etc, Chrome essentially acts as the language runtime, so the software stack he draws doesn't even get any taller (once the browser releases for all OSes).

iamdave 18y ago
Well he also makes the good point that the web is pointlessly obfuscating everyday operations while balkanizing the end-user market at the same time. Average users don't care if they can publish their resume online, they just want to do it. If they use a web app, they use a web app. In the end, they just want to get things done. I think it's a solid article.
wheels 18y ago
The other important point, hit right up there at the front is: desktop apps aren't going away anytime soon. It's been a real ride for me coming back into the web world after about 6 years of working on enterprise and desktop apps. Everyone in the web world seems to think we're just on the cusp of everything moving over to the web. Which is pretty much what they were saying when I was working in web programming 7 years ago. To the rest of the universe, desktop apps are still mainstays of day-to-day computing and while there is a shift, it's much more gradual than people in the web business seem to assume. Amusingly, this phenomenon is not all that different from what folks working in the Linux desktop have been assuming since I got into that some 8 years ago: that this is the year of the Linux desktop. It's about to tip any day now...
- jacobscott 18y ago
  Okay, I agree. That makes three facts everyone knows to go with the three mspaint drawings. I appreciate ted's snark, I just wanted something compelling enough to get riled up in agreement.
  - wheels 18y ago
    Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere? This seems obvious to me, but I've gotten into a number of arguments with folks on it. There seems to be a certain fervor and excitement about "web 2.0" that people seem to get carried away in forecasting its implications. For me this is kind of amusing, since I've been tracking networking stuff through a couple decades of "thin client" fads. "The network is the computer" is hardly a new idea. :-) Usually when I want to be really productive on my computer, the first thing I do is unplug the DSL router. :-)
    - nostrademons 18y ago
      > Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere? When I worked at a company doing enterprise financial software, I got the distinct impression that it was virtually impossible to sell a new desktop app. Our customers wanted everything to be web-based. I was hired as a desktop app developer and got switched over to web development after 8 months because all our new products were web-based. I suspect that we'll see something similar to what happened with PCs and mainframes. The PC didn't kill the mainframe - all the old apps that used to run on mainframes still ran on mainframes. However, all new software, the category-killers that created new markets, were all developed on the PC. Mainframes stuck around for years before finally being killed by Y2K and web-based intranet apps, and some are still working. Similarly, I think any attempt to displace office suites and such on the web is a losing battle. PC-based apps are "good enough" for what they're used for. But virtually all new killer apps, the ones with exciting market opportunities, will be on the web. Or they'll be web/desktop hybrids like DropBox, RescueTime, or BitTorrent, in cases where the app needs some local data that the browser can't provide. Then PC apps will finally be killed by whatever new thick client ends up replacing the web, but we've got a while (maybe 10-20 years) before that happens.
jules 18y ago
The stack doesn't get taller, but it does get much slower. Javascript just isn't a good VM "bytecode". And HTML isn't a good graphics API.
- philf 18y ago
  V8 actually compiles JS to native code.
  - jules 18y ago
    And it's still orders of magnitude slower than native applications.
    - qwph 18y ago
      Can you publish the results that this assertion is based on please?
      - orib 18y ago
        Google is failing me now and I've got class in the morning, but you can find benchmarks comparing Lua-JIT and V8, and Lua-JIT beats V8. Lua-JIT is quite a bit slower than native code. Depending on what you're doing/benchmarking it seems to generally be between 5 to 10 times slower.
      - jules 18y ago
        http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/ http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/ Chrome isn't much faster than the others.

kajecounterhack 18y ago

I think he needs to make one thing clear: CHROME IS A BROWSER. http://xkcd.com/198/ http://xkcd.com/198/

collint 18y ago

The argument about percentage for use/knowledge of web-based office apps does not support the article. To clarify, I'll put another app's name in the same percentage. There was a time when 73% of Americans had never even heard of Youtube. As long as more than 73% of Americans have heard of Youtube this statement is quite likely true. While Youtube clearly had a wonderful growth curve, both are horribly useless statements. Just as the knowledge of Youtube was low until it became high, knowledge of Google Docs will be low until it becomes high. Or it could stay low forever. But the current percentage/growth rate doesn't actually mean anything.

jrockway 18y ago

I don't think that desktop apps are going anywhere -- but web apps are going to look a lot more like desktop apps very very soon. I think it's safe to say that applications written in dynamic languages (like Javascript) that communicate with the Internet regularly are going to become more common. And a lot of these apps are going to run in something like Chrome or XULRunner. A "desktop app" is a pretty simple distinction. You go to your "desktop" and load the app. From there, the app can read/write the file system, talk to the Internet, read the keyboard and mouse, communicate with special hardware devices, etc. Web apps are going to be very much like this very soon. And then there will be no difference between a web app and a desktop app.

jbert 18y ago
> And then there will be no difference between a web app and a desktop app. So why choose to write a "web app" in that case? What distinguishes the two - what is the defining characteristic of a web app? (One comes on a CD, one is downloaded - no) (One is written in C++, one is written in a vm-hosted language - no). Is it just that you use HTML/JS to write the app?
- jrockway 18y ago
  One distinguishing factor is that the "authoritative" copy of the data is on "the server", not on your disk. Web apps may not have full functionality unless connected to the 'net. (Think about how apps that use Gears work now.)
  - jbert 18y ago
    That's an interesting criterion, but there are plenty of "traditional" desktop apps who keep data server side (any thin-client DB program using ODBC, subversion clients, etc). Even IMAP email clients I suppose. So is a web app "something which keeps primary data on a server, and uses the HTTP protocol to read+write it"?
blackmac 18y ago
I think recently desktop apps started to look much more like web apps. I believe that's the right direction, as web apps are "usually" more focused on the one thing they do best and appear less cluttered. Under the hood you might be right though - see Gears, which enables web apps to do a lot of those desktop things.

axod 18y ago

It's all in definitions. For a lot of people, the web is already their O/S, and they could easily do without windows/OSX/linux. I think we will see more machines that go that way and just have a bare bones linux o/s with chrome/firefox on top of it. Sure, desktop software will always be around, for techies and hardcore gamers, but for the average non-tech user, they don't really need desktop software, and webapps are more natural and useful for them. (Tons of advantages to them). I think some people are underestimating just how much google can throw at chrome in terms of marketing. They already have a link on google.com, and there's a ton of other ways they can promote it. I think "Windows killer" is unwarranted, but it'll most likely make windows even less relevant than it is now to most people.

sown 18y ago

I think I can understand the author's frustration. While it might be just definitions unless we are willing to divest the word operating systems of all its meaning, I think we need to be really sure that we need a web version of word. I can see some kind of apps requiring to live "in the cloud" but I don't think desktop apps need to live there.

froo 18y ago
we need a web version of word I thought we already had a web version of the word - "web portal" Google as far as I can tell is already essentially a "web OS" (I think they lost their rights to call themselves a just a search engine a long time ago) and Chrome is just Google's attempt to integrate their "web OS" more readily with your computer/device.
- sown 18y ago
  I meant more like "Microsoft Word". :)
  - froo 18y ago
    Zoho Writer, Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword etc.
    - unalone 18y ago
      Yeah, but each one has pretty big flaws with it. None directly compare yet.
      - froo 18y ago
        I guess that's what happens when you have 25 years of development time in a product (Word was originally released in 1983 called Multi-Tool Word) vs what... 2 for the rest?
        sown 18y ago

alaskamiller 18y ago

TechCrunch also believes that Facebook is becoming a Web OS as well.

jcromartie 18y ago

How about the multiple interrelated stacks that make up web app development? That's what's really scary. You've at least got a server OS with its own kernel, runtimes, HTTP server, database server, application server, web framework, HTTP, SQL, SSL, HMTL, CSS, JavaScript, the browser itself, jQuery or other client-side frameworks, web services, etc. etc. etc. ... It's madness!

maxklein 18y ago

This is not relevant. The layers are not really built on top of each other in that way. Windows is mostly just a collection of libraries which do important stuff. If you did not have this libraries, you'd have to write the libraries. So this is not a layer you can remove, it's an essential part of the application. Things like the Java VM are a real layer, but things like MFC (which chrome does not use, it uses WTL) do not really slow things down or act as a real layer. They compile down to the same code as if you were to do this by yourself. And anyways, what's the point? We should stop writing web apps?

startingup 18y ago

Let me list the ways that Chrome starts to encroach on the OS territory. 1. It has a fast Javascript VM, that converts Javascript into native code, cutting through lots of layers. 2. Each Javascript app (i.e a tab) runs in its own process, which the browser manages. So effectively Chrome is the OS layer as far as your JS apps is concerned. 3. The browser provides a nice control panel for managing those tasks and provides stats about its usage - again tradtionally what you wanted from an OS. 4. Chrome is not yet cross-platform, but we can expect it to be cross platform in due course. It is open source with a BSD license, so I am guessing lots of people have already started compiling it to every platform on earth. Expect unofficial distros soon. 5. Layering Chrome on top of a very stripped down Linux or BSD kernel, letting Chrome do all the GUI work is possible. Chrome does not need MFC, it is layered directly on top of a lower level graphics library (Win32). The calls Chrome needs could be done on top of BSD fairly easily. In fact, that is how Chrome (or Firefox for that matter) is really cross-platform - they come with their own widget sets (i.e MFC equivalent) rather than relying on the specific platform's widget set. Incidentally, Java does the exact same thing. 6. OEMs could come up with a 20-30 MB distribution of Chrome, with everything included (kernel, libraries, JS, Flash etc) and bundle it as a web top. So, yes, Chrome is an alternative to traditional operating systems. The fact that it would include a stripped down BSD kernel doesn't count: from the application perspective Chrome is the OS. Snark is all fine and dandy, but occasionally exercising the brain cells a little bit keeps them in good working order.

blasdel 18y ago
WRONG I think most of this 'WebOS' bullshit was kicked off by web-dilettante Jason Kottke, and it's even more ridiculous this time around, because Chrome is the least OS-like modern web browser yet made (and Firefox would be the most OS-like by far). Chrome is not trying to be the operating system, it's trying to get out of its way. By using a shared-nothing separate process for each tab and plugin, it's letting the Kernel and libc do the job they were designed to do. Most modern browsers (especially FF3) are trying to do an operating system's job — scheduling logically independent processes, micro-managing memory allocations, mapping virtual memory, providing an internal windowing system, providing an internal GUI scripting system. The whole point of an 'operating system' is to present a lot of layers. Chrome does none of these things. It parries them off to the real operating system, where they belong — instead of adding another five nested layers on top of the pile of indirection.

silentbicycle 18y ago

I'll call it an OS when it boots.

pavelludiq 18y ago
I'll call it an os when i can make toast with it: http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/08/11/toaster-pc-runs-bsd-and-makes-toast http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/08/11/toast...
sah 18y ago
Does Linux boot, or is that GRUB/LILO? Remember loadlin? Does that count? What about Windows XP under VirtualBox?

extension 18y ago

The once clear meaning of "operating system" has become vague with today's software stack, but that's a semantic debate. The web is undeniably an application platform and in that capacity, it is improved significantly by Chrome. The most successful web applications, social and communication apps, would likely have never existed on the desktop. There is also a broad class of desktop apps that have no forseeable migration path to the web such as rich media editing (photo/audio/video/etc) and games. Which apps will make the leap from desktop to web is a subject ripe for speculation, but it's not going to be all of them. Such hyperbolic revolutionary fantasies always go unfulfilled.

KevinMS 18y ago

You know who also thought a web browser could become a replacement for the OS? Microsoft. So much so they freaked out and ruined netscape, tried to ruin Real Media, and tried to extend and extinquish Javascript and Java, and almost got their company broken up by the government they were so worried about it. And now its back, and looking like more of a threat than ever.