Tuesday, August 09, 2011

As browsers evolve into platforms.

With the new capabilities of  HTML5 a number of companies are trying to make a DeskTop OS based entirely within the browser.  Called Cloud OS's.



This is a Kludge, and a hack! It's patching over deficiencies is current OS designs that are trapped in a 40 year Unix old paradigm.


The connected OS or Cloud OS have a number of major short comings. 
They can't run disconnected.  True wireless Internet is becoming almost ubiquitous  via wifi and cell carriers, but there are dead spots, and when traveling overseas on on a plane or ship. 
Also in the event of some crisis that causes an outage or a provide going out of business your left with a brick. 


In addition you have to program with new logic and languages, to try to support a connectionless interface, so you move from C/C++ to Java/Javascript and json/ajax.  


Also this new Paradigm just locks developer in to new assumptions and once again they will be broadsided and have to rewrite completely again once the next crop of new interfaces come out. 


There are more new interface technology on the horizon way beyond multitouch, such as gesture sensing, spatial awareness.  AR. 

There is a better way to structure this and I am working on it now. The important part is a radical break from the old way of thinking about code. 



Mozilla's Nightingale: Why Firefox Still Matters
"Mozilla could be heading into an open confrontation with its rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft as browsers evolve into platforms. Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering John Nightingale gave some insight on the past, present, and future of Mozilla and outlined why Firefox still matters. While Mozilla is accused of copying features from other browsers, the company says the opposite is the case. Nightingale says that a future Firefox will give a user much more control over what he does on the Internet and that Mozilla plans on competing with the ideal of an open web against siloed environments." Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).


Mozilla's Vision of an 'Internet Life' Platform
"Mozilla chairperson Mitchell Baker has been saying the company may be changing and thinking beyond Firefox in the future. Her ideas have become clearer: she is formulating an 'Internet Life' platform (not based on Gecko) that would enable users to manage their identity on web. Mozilla believes this could be a way for the company reach new users. She wrote, 'Windows is a locked down operating system compared to Linux. One is proprietary, one is free software. In the early days some Mozilla contributors urged that we should care only about Linux. They felt our mission would be better served by limiting our offering to platforms that align well with the Mozilla mission. We choose a different path. We chose to take our values to where people live. People were living on Windows, so we went there. We made it easy for people to switch from Windows to Linux by providing key functionality across platforms. If we hadn’t, the web would be a very sorry place today. We should bring Mozilla values to where people are living today. We should do so at multiple layers of Internet life.'"


Where Is Firefox OS?

"Microsoft's very simple yet graceful concept raises a very big question. The way Microsoft is planning out Windows 8, developers will be able to write one HTML 5 app which will run across every Windows 8 form factor, from desktops to laptops, to ARM netbooks and tablets. Given the concept, if you remove the operating system — or at least make it transparent enough that the browser becomes the platform — then suddenly every piece of software works across every piece of hardware which raises the question that why Mozilla hasn't considered a Firefox OS?"

 

 

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