[cap-talk] browsers as operating system

[Sandro Magi]

A recent Arstechnica article [1] made a good point regarding Chromium
and Google's motives behind pushing it. Web applications are currently
second-class citizens on a user's desktop, with a non-customizable
menus, and a confusing array of superfluous buttons, and web apps are
not isolated from one another.

Chrome addresses every single one of these issues, since each web app
now runs as its own isolated process, there are no menu bars so each web
app is free to define their own menus within the browser, they've
reduced the standard buttons to a bare minimum, and the performance is
quite good with their jitted JavaScript VM. And web-apps are
cross-platform to boot.

Chrome positions Google's applications, like Google docs, as viable
desktop program replacements. Truly MS's worst fear realized. So yes,
the browser is becoming a rich enough environment to play a significant
role in a user's desktop.

Sandro

[1]
http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2008/09/02/straight-out-of-compton

John Carlson wrote:
> I think we have to start thinking about web browsers as operating  
> systems.  The have multiple processes.  They should support any  
> language coming over the the network "in rendering engine space",  
> whether it be HTML, XML, CSS, XSLT, XPath, JavaScript, ECMAScript,  
> ActionScript, Java, E, Joe-E, C#, C++, C, etc.
>
> Should we be considering the browser kernel (not the rendering engine,  
> which renders to a bitmap) as a possible thing to base a capability OS  
> on?  Would there be a lot of ambient authority API calls that would  
> simply be missing from a browser tab process?
>
> I found this: http://crypto.stanford.edu/websec/chromium/chromium-security-architecture.pdf
>
> Should we start writing linkers, compilers and IDEs for the browser  
> kernel.  How about:
>
> javac http://www.coderextreme.net/MyClass.java
>
> Or will we all start using Lively Kernel RSN?  As far as I can tell,  
> Chromium runs Lively Kernel just fine!  Why it is not on their web  
> page is beyond me!
>
> John
>
>
>
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