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Comment by wolletd | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward to the day when I can run a browser in my browser.

The point would be to run the browser directly on the hardware without any intervening useless layers like X-Windows or Wayland, then implement the desktop environment in that, and when you needed to pop up a browser window on the desktop (which you always need to do frequently), or an html app like you'd usually run in Electron, simply and efficiently use the same browser that's running the desktop environment, sandboxed the way all modern browsers now already implement their renderers isolated from their chrome ui frames.

No need to run the user's browsers separately inside a slower layer of emulation, when you already have a browser implementing the desktop.

Fewer layers and less bloaty software is better. We're already stuck with the browser, and it's not going away, so use it for everything. X-Windows and Wayland are obsolete and useless, so should be flushed.

I think ChromeOS Freon was close to what you're describing, but they ended up switching to Wayland at some point

Yet another step backwards.

Current desktop user interfaces are terrible, and we need the flexibility of a web browser to innovate and implement better ones, since Wayland is simply not up to it, because it's not extensible at runtime in JavaScript or any other language. (No, recompiling or dynamically linking in DLLs doesn't count -- that's just ActiveX.)

>because it's not extensible at runtime in JavaScript or any other language.

Nothing is stopping someone from making a wayland compositor that is.

Except the design of Wayland, and the Wayland developers, and the many years that have passed.

Web browsers are a terrible place to do innovations, a major problem being the absolute backwards compatibility they need to maintain. Web standards are massive complexity beasts which are constantly growing and basically none of that can be dropped. The dynamicity of JavaScript is actually a major problem for performance (difficult to optimize beyond a certain point), that's a major motivating factor for WASM, but that has its own problems (no direct access to DOM).

You can implement the innovations in JavaScript and WASM and other standards that are already there. Just like the subject of this discussion, a Windows-like desktop, is implemented in JavaScript and HTML and CSS and canvas and whatever else. That's all perfectly sufficient.

As complex and backwards compatible as web browsers and JavaScript are, you already need all that complexity anyway and already end up paying for it all. So why not use it to implement the desktop too?

I'm not proposing eliminating the web browser. Are you? I'm just saying use the web browser you already have all the way down, instead of re-implementing part of it.

The problem with DaedalOS is that it doesn't bother to innovate, it just implements old designs: Windows 95 or so. No pie menus, no tabs, no virtual desktops, no rooms, just old ideas.

But those old designs are not hard-coded into the browser, they're all just software you load into the browser and can change. Why not be able to change the entire actual desktop that way?

> Why not be able to change the entire actual desktop that way?

I think you need to invert and ask - why to do all this? You'll get much worse performance, many extra layers when you need more direct access to hardware etc.

> Web browsers are a terrible place to do innovations, a major problem being the absolute backwards compatibility they need to maintain.

How so? The biggest innovations in the browser in recent years have been shadow-DOM type stuff like React/Vue, plus WASM and WebGL. None of these are backwards compatible with older browsers.

It's the web browsers which need to keep perfect backwards compatibility with essentially all existing web standards.

Like what? Sites don't ask me to allow ActiveX or check if I have Flash installed, and CSS support across browsers is not uniform even now. JQuery did more to ensure JS compatibility across browsers than the vendors themselves.

At that point, you aren't using anything on the host browser except the WASM interpreter and the canvas element, so why bother with any of its other components?

Because the other components are extremely useful for implementing a desktop user interface, and you need the other components anyway to implement the user's web browser, of course.

Why isn't this obvious? I already said "when you needed to pop up a browser window on the desktop ... simply and efficiently use the same browser that's running the desktop environment". Did you read what I wrote?

What other components will you be using if you're running WASM on a canvas element?

Why restrict yourself to running WASM on a canvas element? Maybe the desktop wants to draw something with html and css and svg. As they tend to do. Did you run DaedalOS? Do you think that's all implemented with WASM and a canvas element?

Go back and read what I read please. You're arguing about something I didn't say, and ignoring what I did say. I never said to implement the desktop in only WASM and canvas.

And it's not about cloning Windows 95, it's about providing a flexible extensible platform for making much better desktop user interfaces than Windows 95 and everything else.

I think I'm good, thank you.

I'm glad I was able to finally make my point. But if you're not willing or able to read and understand what we're discussing, and respond to what I'm actually writing, then please don't bother trying to participate in the discussion, so I don't have to repeat myself to somebody who won't listen. Just sit this one out. Thanks!

Edit: you just did make my point that you weren't listening, and that you have nothing to contribute to the discussion, but I'll let you have the last word since that seems to be all you want. Unless you want to pointlessly announce you're going to leave again.

I believe I just did.

"How many levels of virtualization are you on?"

"Like, maybe 2 or 3 right now, my dude"

"You are like a little baby, watch this..."

opens 10 browsers inside browsers recursively and crashes hyper-v

The browser is a lie. There is no browser.

Future historians will note that this is the era in which the operating system (OS) was replaced by the browsing system (BS).

20 years ago I had one of my most memorable dreams. I was in the bridge of a Star Trek ship. Something bad was happening. The captain gave an order. I yelled "belay that order - I'm from a higher level". The captain said "I am a level 4!" I replied that I was a level 10.

Boot to Gecko? Gaia was a UI written in HTML that itself contained a browser component capable of browsing the wider Internet.

Or even plain ChomeOS -- especially if you then run Firefox for Android.

No, we need to go deeper.

Inception bwaaaaaaaa

maybe worth noting in case people missed it, but this DaedalOS already has that

Creepy analogy available here with our universe-as-a-simulation

100 years before our simulation developed The Browser, Hegel wrote book about it. IIRC he predicted the World would end once the Geist would become self aware. Do we know better and tell it is just a stack overflow of recursive browser instances?

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