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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Any sufficiently advanced web browser is indistinguishable from an operating system.

You joke, but I've been thinking. Tabs were mind blowingly good UX when they first came out, But with WebAssembly et al, are tabs still the right abstraction?

> But with WebAssembly et al, are tabs still the right abstraction?

How are these two things related? One is for running code in a VM, and the other is a UX pattern for presenting multiple screens/interfaces for multitasking.

Sorry I jumped three steps in my head. If browsers are truly beginning to implement OS features, pretending that the web is a series of 2d sites rendered through the dom into a series of tabs may be an overly restrictive view of the world. What if a browser were reimagined as an OS where internet resources were 1st class objects? I don't have holistic view, just a shower thought.

This might be crazy, but... I think it would be kinda cool if tabs were a Thing at the window-manager level. It’s sort of a reverse approach to solving the Electron “problem”- instead of making web applications more like desktop applications, make desktop applications (including browsers) work more seamlessly together.

That's what MS is trying to do with the "Sets" feature in Windows 10.

Some window managers for GNU/Linux have had that for a long time; the best known is http://fluxbox.org/

I wish opening a VM with a different operating system was as easy as opening a new tab

A modern web browser has more source code lines than an operating system.

Maybe if you exclude device drivers, but Linux[0] has more lines of code vs WebKit[1].

[0] https://www.openhub.net/p/Linux/analyses/latest/languages_su...

[1] https://www.openhub.net/p/WebKit/analyses/latest/languages_s...

With much worse UX and interoperability capabilities, unfortunately.

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