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Comment by ye | Hacker News Reader

> What could you conceivably do on the desktop that you can't do on the browser?

Off the top of my head,

1) Anything low level hardware (reading data via USB, or pushing data into HDMI, for instance)

2) Interacting with ANY hardware that's not explicitly supported by Javascript. Try creating an HTML5/JS scanner app.

3) Writing super-fast CPU-specific code, think Assembly language. That's the reason there are no HTML5 apps of the Photoshop caliber.

4) Disk access. Try creating a Javascript-based antivirus. Or an app that watches for changes in a certain directory.

5) Internal network access. Try writing a JS app interacting with your localhost or TCP/IP or UDP.

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All of your points are completely valid today. I would come back in 5 years and see that probably all of those are achievable by the browser and Javascript.

Eg: >1) Anything low level hardware (reading data via USB, or pushing data into HDMI, for instance)

I would expect that a Nexus device can do Chromecast from browser screen, if not today then soon.

>2) Interacting with ANY hardware that's not explicitly supported by Javascript. Try creating an HTML5/JS scanner app.

You mean like, taking a photo and processing it? You can do that right now.

>3) Writing super-fast CPU-specific code, think Assembly language. That's the reason there are no HTML5 apps of the Photoshop caliber

Yet, agreed. But soon - only CPU is slowing it down, not the technology.

>4) Disk access. Try creating a Javascript-based antivirus. Or an app that watches for changes in a certain directory.

There won't be a filesystem as we know it. The 'cloud' and browser-accessible storage will be all we need.

>5) Internal network access. Try writing a JS app interacting with your localhost or TCP/IP or UDP.

Sockets, it's possible now.

> I would expect that a Nexus device can do Chromecast from browser screen, if not today then soon.

No, that's not what I meant. Pushing any data into HDMI, controlled by the app, not the screencasting.

> You mean like, taking a photo and processing it? You can do that right now.

No, I mean connecting to a scanner, scanning a document. You can't do it now. And don't tell me taking a snapshot with a built-in camera is the same thing

> There won't be a filesystem as we know it. The 'cloud' and browser-accessible storage will be all we need.

Sorry, I wasn't aware you could predict the future, and I thought we were talking about now.

> Sockets, it's possible now.

No, your JS app can't access the internal network, unless you expose it to the internet with TCP/IP. Sockets only let you connect to public servers. And no UDP (at least not explicitly).

>I thought we were talking about now.

Ah well, I was talking about the future. You're correct about the above you mention, and regarding sockets I was of course referring to TCP/IP. I'm keeping an eye on the Jolla/ChromeOS/FireFox OS types, more than iOS as I think there will be significant changes to allow the above and more.

IMHO that's list what you can't do "with the browser" not "on the browser". If browser is somehow exposed to interfaces of peripherals/devices/etc there is no reason why you can't do that "on browser". Yes, you can't do that with browser alone, but you can do that on browser.

2) Scanner can act as a web server pushing its UI to the phone after Bluetooth handshake(I think this will be the future of Internet Of Things)

If anything can't be written in JS now, it will be written in JS in the future. Everything will be in JS some day.

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