16
Jun

The Browser is the New Operating System – NOT!

Posted by Steven Hodson in Monday, June 16th 2008      

DESQview - what multitasking use to be like. It never fails lately that at some point usually intelligent people struggle forward with the inane proposition that the Internet and by proxy the web browser is the new operating system. I’m sorry but this is such a bullshit argument. It really is.

The latest screed to put forth this argument is courtesy of Timothy Lee over at Techdirt in which he suggests that because of the proliferation of API’s for all the different web services out there this means these services are being run out of a browser and in turn makes the browser a new operating system. The idea that running a mess of wired up web pages that only exist because of some API makes a browser an operating system is borderline stupid.

One of the underlying tenets of all modern operating systems is the ability to run as many applications as you want concurrently. Each of those programs accessible with the minimum fuss such as just selecting the window you want and easily being able to transfer data between those windows. When was the last time you tried to drag and drop data between two; or more, browser tabbed work areas? It can’t be done.

The idea that a browser with more and more open tabbed work areas is a productive way to work is stupid. As for the idea being anything new then people don’t know their software history very well. DESQView was doing exactly the same sort of things as a work-around to being able to multitask. It wasn’t alone either as DR-DOS, Novell DOS, and later OpenDOS did much the same thing.

Productivity requires a natural method to be able to switch between applications and share information – especially via drag and drop – easily. Having to constantly change between a growing number of tabs within a browser is not productive.

Safari tab hell

Proponents of the Web OS or the browser as an operating system can pontificate all they want about how this is the new platform but the fact is that without a real OS; whether it be Linux, Microsoft or Apple, a browser would have nothing to run on. With nothing to run on there is no way their new operating system of the web has a leg to stand on.



under: The Desktop, The Web    Tags: , , , ,

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Viewing 5 Comments

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    OTOH, I think that Fluid and Prism show great promise for web apps that behave and look like desktop apps, and that run as separate applications. This is the bet behind SIlverlight and Air, except that they're being developed outside of standards bodies (which is dangerous for the future of the Open Web).

    The browser itself will never replace the OS (especially unless they tackle local device access, which is what Microsoft's MESH seems to be about) but it is true that more and more apps are keeping their core bits in the cloud, and becoming more and more universally accessible.

    Site-specific browsers represent the vanguard of this trend, so while I support your premise, I think it's becoming more of a seamless blend of local and cloud hosted resources.
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    • v
    I think this is a classic case of the web forcing a binary view of the world. That is, it is an all or nothing proposition, either the web matters or the desktop matters, there is no middle ground. In fact, that's all we have here is middle ground. It is hard to suggest that web applications are not affecting the desktop and that increasingly it would be possible (if not necessarily recommendable) to have everything as a web app making your choice of desktop OS a much less important decision than it once was. But no one is doing that now, there's whole classes of apps that don't translate well to the web (see iPhone for this dichotomy made obvious). And even then, as you suggest, it isn't an OS, it's simply an app environment.
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    When I worked for The Linux General Store years ago, we deployed "thin clients" at the Atlanta University Center library. All they did was boot and run a web browser. I think we had 128M to play with. Those were the days.

    That's got to be the simplest you could possibly get, but you still needed to run an entire operating system underneath: GUI desktop, window manager, etc.

    People should be careful about how they go throwing around the phrase "Operating System"
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    DESQView was sooo cool! :)

    The ultimate in multitasking, though, had to be RSX/11M, which although it was a command line interface, was all asynchronous! Granted, at times, it tended to look more like the green screen from The Matrix, than anything productive, but once you got the hang of it, it was really cool, too!
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    Steven, as an aging technologist I'm right there with you on this. Operating Systems have much more to manage than a few simple APIs. People like to criticize Microsoft, or praise Apple, or scoff at Linux, but the truth is that each of these pieces of software deals with many more API, memory, hardware, and device calls every second that a browser does all day - not to mention tending to all the event triggers that each subsystem is constantly posting to the kernel.

    True, I didn't get a chance to play with the really big iron that was pre-PC, (and is still used to run all those fancy sites with their simple APIs), but the basic needs of a computer still remain. Memory, storage, input/output all need to be managed by a central system and it ain't a browser brother - no matter how spiffy Firefox 3 is. ;)

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