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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

As you surely noticed, for last 10 years the browser is actively trying to replace your desktop OS, so that the browser would become the platform, instead of Windows / macOS / Linux / anything else. Imagine the desktop becoming ChromeOS on any computer, not just Chromebooks.

For this, the browser must make all the traditional OS interfaces available. It has interfaces for accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, audio, USB, process management (workers), networking (including peer-to-peer), and a number of persistence mechanisms. But before it takes over completely, it has to interoperate with the host OS a bit, too, by exposing the filesystem.

(A decade more, and maybe the vision of Inferno [1] will sort of kind of be implemented.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

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Am I the only crusty old fart who thinks this a lousy trend?

I worry the next talented generation of developers is being alienated from the desktop, and as a result my computing experience will degrade as Chrome's piecemeal attempts to reinvent the OS leave me with an inferior selection of browser-based toys that are awkward and clunky compared to their native counterparts.

I grant the browser fixes a couple things my OS got wrong: installation/uninstallation and updates. But it feels like it does everything else worse.

Is it really surprising that in the wake of multiple platforms that refuse to interoperate that an OS that runs on top of every other OS is massively popular?

It doesn't matter that it's clunky and bad, CS people love working with hard to use systems, it just matters that it works.

The websites google.com and facebook.com and twitter.com (to distinguish from their mobile apps) are very popular, but the most part these sites just render text and images.

google.com doesn't try to search my local drive. faceboook.com doesn't offer to share my local photos. Their usage of "browser as an OS" is extremely limited.

I worry about the other problem: the browser becomes so ubiquitous the OS disappears, along with any platform conventions and application interop.

But why is it always necessarily "awkward and clunky"? As always on network connection becomes more and more ubiquitous, internet connected experiences become better and better. Just look at (well-designed) experiences today like streaming video.

I'm excited about things like WASM that will allow browser-based experiences to close the gap more and more with native apps. The web infrastructure is extremely powerful and has a fairly low barrier to entry so lots of people throw crappy experiences up, granted, but it's generally a good thing to have the resources so accessible.

The web is awkward and clunky because it's a document markup format with bad application APIs layered on top.

WASM solves certain problems like arithmetic being slow. This doesn't fix the web's problems; it merely enables a new class of bad apps to be written on the web.

The best streaming video services are not web based. Thank goodness Netflix and Hulu have native iPad apps to spare me their websites.

> As always on network connection becomes more and more ubiquitous, internet connected experiences become better and better. Just look at (well-designed) experiences today like streaming video.

As not everyone even has a network connection, I find this kind of viewpoint outright dangerous because it leaves out hundreds of millions of people. Streaming video, in particular, seems to choke if you don't if you don't have the absolutely best connection.

You're not alone. In another 20 years, you'll get to laugh tragically as a new generation of naive young techs invent yet another layer of abstraction on top of the browsers and gush about how this time it will finally be a universal platform. And your old 2TB of ram, 50 core cpu laptop might even still be able to run a text editor with only a few seconds of latency.

And it goes without saying that, for your own safety, none of these platforms will run code that hasn't been delivered by a trusted and approved corporate appstore.

The future of computing is very grim.

With more power, comes more stacks of needless abstractions...

20 years? Is that a typo? Actually sincere question -- because it feels like the time horizon for adding another layer is closer to 2 years, not 20.

Not to mention that cloud based software inherently gives MUCH less control to the user.

No, I hate it too. As a consumer, I wish to do my computing in my machine and not in SaaS provider's machines, having to share with them personal data when there's no technical reason to do so.

I think the main driving forces on this are:

1. It's easier for computer illiterate people to use web services, since they don't have to go through an installation process.

2. It's easier for developers to support their users because they don't have to worry about their users' computer environments, which is largely out of their control.

3. It's also harder/impossible for their users to pirate their software, since they it never runs in their machines.

I think the biggest reason (and the one harder to fix) is the piracy one.

> 3. It's also harder/impossible for their users to pirate their software, since they it never runs in their machines.

I think your second point is actually the dominant one, but you're not wrong about this either. In some sense, we get the computing landscape that we (collectively) asked for.

4. It's easier to justify charging a subscription to your web app customers

Same here.

I also get to pick native development over Web whenever possible.

However many of the gigs happen to be Web based, thus here we are.

I would argue that you could use a combination of local storage and global state in these web apps to approximate a file system already. Not to mention lazy loading and web workers to cache larger files needed to run a web app. As well as parrelism and currency already offered by web workers.

Approximation is not what it's about. It's about integration. Write that google doc and store it as a local .docx or .odc. Edit that 20 MB raw picture in a browser app and store it back to the disk, instantly, then feed it to a traditional desktop editor. Write that Python script in a Web IDE, store locally, and upload it to an Arduino.

All those use cases and more can be accomplished if the Write API is limited to a sandboxed local storage with a configurable size limit per domain. I would hate to see all the gains made by sandboxing the browser fly away by allowing it to access any file on the user's system.

I think the idea here is that you'd whitelist files/folders on your actual filesystem for use with the app. This sounds fantastic for me. There's so many useful web based tools that are a pain to work with because you have to manually sync files to and from them.

Just the "last 10 years"?

Nah, replacing the desktop OS has been the goal of browser-makers since the founding of Netscape nearly 25 years ago.

I'd agree with the 10 year timeframe. Before that browsers were basically aiming for HyperCard. It was only after the combination of the WhatWG and the emergence of the app store as an ecosystem threat that the browser vendors have pushed the browser towards OS replacement.

Sorry, the 90s were a real time, and the ambition to replace the desktop OS was already there, as per the ~1995 Bob Metcalfe quip (popularized by Marc Andreesen) that the Netscape browser would soon reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers".

There was a bit of a lull in progress in the mid-2000s, after the fall of Netscape Inc, until the rise of the mobile app threat you mention.

Bill Gates did see Netscape as a potential threat to Windows. Java with Sun's "the network is the computer" motto as well. So yeah, people in the 90s were dreaming big. And then in the 2000s people were complaining that Microsoft set computing back by a decade.

The ChromeOS browser does not have access to local files, it can download files to a ~/Downloads folder, but it cannot manipulate local files.

The entire point of ChromeOS is aggressive sandboxing, not breaking out of the sandbox.

Apparently I can write files in ChromeOS.

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/fileSystem

You get access to this if you have written a Chromebook app. If you get a user to install that, there is a clear set of permissions they are accepting. See the section on permissions, which is specified in the app manifest. It is not an open hole for anything running on a Chromebook.

Or a Chrome app, even though they are currently deprecated.

Yes the user needs to install it, and then it is free reign for $HOME.

So it isn't Download location only.

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