6 ms·

Alright, it's at a kind of uncanny valley situation where we have Windows XP applications running real-time in our browsers. Is the end-game just a universal sa

Alright, it's at a kind of uncanny valley situation where we have Windows XP applications running real-time in our browsers. Is the end-game just a universal sandboxed VM that's cross-platform? What do we do next?

londons_explore 3y ago
Run a web browser in the sandboxed VM duh. Must always add more layers.
adamrezich 3y ago
"The Birth & Death of JavaScript" called it...
- whoopdedo 3y ago
  Seeing as we're talking about a webasm blob rendering into a canvas element, I'd title it "The Death & Rebirth of Flash".
  - baq 3y ago
    Been waiting for this moment since the first asm.js release.
grotorea 3y ago
We can already do that for DOS programs, right? So a few more decades and it should work for XP too.
- lagniappe 3y ago
  I still can't find Unreal Tournament 2000 running in the browser :( and not Return to Napali either :/ My heart will go on.
  - jakearmitage 3y ago
    https://icculus.org/ut99-emscripten/ https://icculus.org/ut99-emscripten/ Here you go.
    - lagniappe 3y ago
      > This is just the intro flyby to show it works. The whole game is not included because it's a big download and not mine to give out.
      - jakearmitage 3y ago
        Right, but it's not a technical issue. It is a legal one.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    There is no UT2000. ut99, 2003/4
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    Fun fact: Unreal was the first real, major piece of software that got ported to run in the browser, in a collaboration between Epic and Mozilla... almost a decade ago https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-and-epic-preview-unreal-engine-4-running-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-and-epic-preview...
    - speakingorthly 3y ago
      Unreal Engine support is coming back to the browser, and with faster performance and load times than ever before! My team and I at Wonder Interactive are building a hosting platform and suite of devtools that enable native games and 3D apps in the browser using WebAssembly and WebGPU. Unreal is the first of many engines we'll support, we started with it because it has historically had subpar (and since the deprecation of HTML5 support in UE4, non-existent support for the web platform!) Check out a few of our demos below, as well as a roadmap blog post we did last year: https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog Top down RPG UE4 game demo: https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/ https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/ Space game demo (UE4) - https://play.spacelancers.com/ https://play.spacelancers.com/
esperkin39 3y ago
For better or for worse, that's what Google is aiming at with ChromeOS. Especially now that the overarching "OS" is really just a Linux shell for multiple VMs. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/lacros.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
- asfgiaosnio 3y ago
  People often claim that ChromeOS is versatile enough to replace a normal computer because it has these various compatibility layers. They often fail to mention that they work terribly. You wind up with the poor performance and annoying isolation that VMs give, but with an extra helping of instability and incompatibility. Running anything Google hasn't approved is gated behind "developer mode", and even for a developer the pseudo-Debian container "developer mode" unlocks is confusing. I regularly encounter problems (like needing to run Wireshark) that I believe are simply unsolvable. I don't understand anything about ChromeOS. At one point it was a bad but clear idea: a machine with just a web browser, capable only of running web apps. Then at some point they decided to just make the world's most complicated and confusing Linux distro, with the vestigial browser-centric design kept around just to make things as inconsistent as possible.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Test of if an OS is ready for regular users: Does drag and drop work? Can I choose a random image/file somewhere in one tab/application and drop it into another. Just testing that now... * Drag HN logo to Whatsapp Web: Pass * Drag from Google Photos to Photopea: Pass * Drag a zip file from Google Drive to Dropbox: Fail. * Drag an attachment from an email from gmail into an online hex editor: Fail Conclusion: The web platform isn't yet ready.
    - jrajav 3y ago
      You could just as easily construct an arbitrary usability test over interop that the web platform excels at while current desktop apps do terribly. For instance: * Send a link to a Google Drive document to another person on WeChat: Pass * Send a link to a Microsoft Word document to another person on Slack: Fail The web has different paradigms and some of them are an improvement, one being hyperlinks, another being instant delivery just for example (no install time).
Alekhine 3y ago
I mean, that was kind of the idea behind the JVM, wasn't it? It's not a terrible idea.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Fun fact: when you don't give a shit about whether your UI looks like what "the OS looks like" (no offense to Tantacrul, but audacity clearly doesn't), you can get a surprising amount of work done. This isn't a Windows XP application, it looked like this well before Windows XP existed.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Audacity is a cross-platform app that runs on (at least) Linux, macOS and windows (I suspect most other *nixes are supported to). Also, note that most creative apps (music, video, art) do not follow the UI guidelines for any particular OS platform (partly because they tend to be cross-platform, partly because their needs are very different from office productivity and communications apps. This is true even when the apps are nominally made by Apple for Apple (see Logic Pro or FCP for examples). Finally, Tantacrul has zero responsibility for the UI appearance of the Audacity that Wavacity is based on.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    So we agree: this appication/UI has nothing to do with "Windows XP".
- raincole 3y ago
  As a game dev I haven't seen an app (except browser and terminal) that looks like the OS native UI for quite a while. Blender, Houdini, 3DCoat, Photoshop, Krita, FL Studio, Bitwig... all of them use their own UI widget.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    I'm trying to think how you'd even make blender or bitwig look native, but then I remember the DirectShow node graph editor from the windows 98 days and I'm going to stop thinking about this again.
- nativeit 3y ago
  I strongly support using OSS every chance I have, and do what I can as a non-programmer to support OSS projects, but as someone who trained on industry standards for audio editing (since the 1990s, starting with Syntrillium’s Cool Edit Pro) I found Audacity quite difficult to use. I really don’t understand this philosophy that prefers when applications lack any cohesive visual design language. “Designed by engineers” is every bit as problematic to me as “engineering by designers”.
malux85 3y ago
Much further in each direction, on the left, we compile LLMs to bare metal and boot them without an operating system. On the right, we have more layers, so we must boot a VM in the browser, visit the same webpage, boot a vm on that page, and then run wavacity in that.
otikik 3y ago
Run internet explorer inside our browsers, of course
Lammy 3y ago
> What do we do next? The next step will be the same stack except the browser engine will be running in """The Cloud""" and streamed to your consumption-only device like an OnLive/Stadia/PSNow game. Everything already has dedicated video-decoding hardware so it will probably be sold as better for battery life to rely on that instead of the unpredictable load of your own local OS and browser engine.
dspillett 3y ago
> What do we do next? Recompile Chromium for webasm. Run Chromium in Chromium in Chromium… Then add Firefox into the mix. (Being facetious of course, not wishing to put down managing to get an Audacity port running this way which is cool and even potentially useful (should you find yourself desperately in need of an audio editor in a place where you can't install software packages)).

londons_explore 3y ago

Run a web browser in the sandboxed VM duh. Must always add more layers.

adamrezich 3y ago

"The Birth & Death of JavaScript" called it...

whoopdedo 3y ago
Seeing as we're talking about a webasm blob rendering into a canvas element, I'd title it "The Death & Rebirth of Flash".
- baq 3y ago
  Been waiting for this moment since the first asm.js release.

grotorea 3y ago

We can already do that for DOS programs, right? So a few more decades and it should work for XP too.

lagniappe 3y ago
I still can't find Unreal Tournament 2000 running in the browser :( and not Return to Napali either :/ My heart will go on.
- jakearmitage 3y ago
  https://icculus.org/ut99-emscripten/ https://icculus.org/ut99-emscripten/ Here you go.
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    > This is just the intro flyby to show it works. The whole game is not included because it's a big download and not mine to give out.
    - jakearmitage 3y ago
      Right, but it's not a technical issue. It is a legal one.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  There is no UT2000. ut99, 2003/4
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  Fun fact: Unreal was the first real, major piece of software that got ported to run in the browser, in a collaboration between Epic and Mozilla... almost a decade ago https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-and-epic-preview-unreal-engine-4-running-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-and-epic-preview...
  - speakingorthly 3y ago
    Unreal Engine support is coming back to the browser, and with faster performance and load times than ever before! My team and I at Wonder Interactive are building a hosting platform and suite of devtools that enable native games and 3D apps in the browser using WebAssembly and WebGPU. Unreal is the first of many engines we'll support, we started with it because it has historically had subpar (and since the deprecation of HTML5 support in UE4, non-existent support for the web platform!) Check out a few of our demos below, as well as a roadmap blog post we did last year: https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog Top down RPG UE4 game demo: https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/ https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/ Space game demo (UE4) - https://play.spacelancers.com/ https://play.spacelancers.com/

esperkin39 3y ago

For better or for worse, that's what Google is aiming at with ChromeOS. Especially now that the overarching "OS" is really just a Linux shell for multiple VMs. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/lacros.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...

asfgiaosnio 3y ago
People often claim that ChromeOS is versatile enough to replace a normal computer because it has these various compatibility layers. They often fail to mention that they work terribly. You wind up with the poor performance and annoying isolation that VMs give, but with an extra helping of instability and incompatibility. Running anything Google hasn't approved is gated behind "developer mode", and even for a developer the pseudo-Debian container "developer mode" unlocks is confusing. I regularly encounter problems (like needing to run Wireshark) that I believe are simply unsolvable. I don't understand anything about ChromeOS. At one point it was a bad but clear idea: a machine with just a web browser, capable only of running web apps. Then at some point they decided to just make the world's most complicated and confusing Linux distro, with the vestigial browser-centric design kept around just to make things as inconsistent as possible.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Test of if an OS is ready for regular users: Does drag and drop work? Can I choose a random image/file somewhere in one tab/application and drop it into another. Just testing that now... * Drag HN logo to Whatsapp Web: Pass * Drag from Google Photos to Photopea: Pass * Drag a zip file from Google Drive to Dropbox: Fail. * Drag an attachment from an email from gmail into an online hex editor: Fail Conclusion: The web platform isn't yet ready.
  - jrajav 3y ago
    You could just as easily construct an arbitrary usability test over interop that the web platform excels at while current desktop apps do terribly. For instance: * Send a link to a Google Drive document to another person on WeChat: Pass * Send a link to a Microsoft Word document to another person on Slack: Fail The web has different paradigms and some of them are an improvement, one being hyperlinks, another being instant delivery just for example (no install time).

Alekhine 3y ago

I mean, that was kind of the idea behind the JVM, wasn't it? It's not a terrible idea.

TheRealPomax 3y ago

Fun fact: when you don't give a shit about whether your UI looks like what "the OS looks like" (no offense to Tantacrul, but audacity clearly doesn't), you can get a surprising amount of work done. This isn't a Windows XP application, it looked like this well before Windows XP existed.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Audacity is a cross-platform app that runs on (at least) Linux, macOS and windows (I suspect most other *nixes are supported to). Also, note that most creative apps (music, video, art) do not follow the UI guidelines for any particular OS platform (partly because they tend to be cross-platform, partly because their needs are very different from office productivity and communications apps. This is true even when the apps are nominally made by Apple for Apple (see Logic Pro or FCP for examples). Finally, Tantacrul has zero responsibility for the UI appearance of the Audacity that Wavacity is based on.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  So we agree: this appication/UI has nothing to do with "Windows XP".
raincole 3y ago
As a game dev I haven't seen an app (except browser and terminal) that looks like the OS native UI for quite a while. Blender, Houdini, 3DCoat, Photoshop, Krita, FL Studio, Bitwig... all of them use their own UI widget.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  I'm trying to think how you'd even make blender or bitwig look native, but then I remember the DirectShow node graph editor from the windows 98 days and I'm going to stop thinking about this again.
nativeit 3y ago
I strongly support using OSS every chance I have, and do what I can as a non-programmer to support OSS projects, but as someone who trained on industry standards for audio editing (since the 1990s, starting with Syntrillium’s Cool Edit Pro) I found Audacity quite difficult to use. I really don’t understand this philosophy that prefers when applications lack any cohesive visual design language. “Designed by engineers” is every bit as problematic to me as “engineering by designers”.

malux85 3y ago

Much further in each direction, on the left, we compile LLMs to bare metal and boot them without an operating system. On the right, we have more layers, so we must boot a VM in the browser, visit the same webpage, boot a vm on that page, and then run wavacity in that.

otikik 3y ago

Run internet explorer inside our browsers, of course

Lammy 3y ago

> What do we do next? The next step will be the same stack except the browser engine will be running in """The Cloud""" and streamed to your consumption-only device like an OnLive/Stadia/PSNow game. Everything already has dedicated video-decoding hardware so it will probably be sold as better for battery life to rely on that instead of the unpredictable load of your own local OS and browser engine.

dspillett 3y ago

> What do we do next? Recompile Chromium for webasm. Run Chromium in Chromium in Chromium… Then add Firefox into the mix. (Being facetious of course, not wishing to put down managing to get an Audacity port running this way which is cool and even potentially useful (should you find yourself desperately in need of an audio editor in a place where you can't install software packages)).