Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkopec | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com