Hacker News Reader

Comment by kajaktum | Hacker News Reader

Can someone tell me why OSes can't do what browsers do? It seems to me that browsers are the OS of today so why not just skip the middleman and make it first class? It seems to be a layer that exists solely because the 3 competing OSes is incompatible and browsers just happen to be compatible (for how long?).

View on HN

Not everyone prefers browsers, especially these days when they are consolidating into one engine. Especially with text editors where you will be dealing with local files, a browser based editor won't work well.

Do you mean like ChromeOS?

Electron isn't popular just because it's cross-platform, but I think that is a big reason. The only other realistic option is Qt and that's looking increasingly dated.

nothing these days is really stopping you from making a cross platform native gui app, like with Qt, wxWidgets or similar. The only reason you wouldnt do it is because a lack of skilled programmers, and/or time.

Ive built quick little apps in Qt or wxWidgets for my wife, they use a few MB at most, they don't use any cpu unless you click on them (because naturally, theyre suspended), and the code bases are incredibly concise.

It really is, as gen z would say, a skill issue.

Or, said the other way around: Its simple and easy to use, and as a tradeoff you get no performance.

No, what I mean is that our browsers are becoming OSes. So why don't OSes become more like browsers? The way it works now is that each of my tabs have their own VM (tabs) that runs on another VM (browsers) which itself runs on another VM (OS). Why can't tabs just be processes that run directly on the OS (with all its security features).

Every time I see any problems/advancements in browsers, I squint my eyes and they look exactly like an OS problems/advancements.

Do you even know what an OS is? How can you ask this question? Who will communicate with the hardware?

The kernel is just a bunch of code. What prevents the browsers from implementing all the capabilities of the kernel? Why can't my computer boots into a browser directly and it then figures out how to talk and manage the hardware directly.

The way I see it, OSes of today is simply an implementation detail of the browser. 99% of the world won't even care or notice f Windows 12 is is shipped as a Ubuntu distro with familiar UIs. Heck, not even most developers will I think.

I have this thought when I ponder on the fact that most programming languages of today assumes a virtual machine of one kind or another. But...the OS is already a virtual machine (of the yesteryear I suppose). The only reason we don't have yet another level of virtual machine inside our browsers is that most browsers are almost fully compatible. Even each browsers starts having diverging APIs then its only a matter of time before someone creates an OS on top of browsers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com