In response to Jean-Louis Glassee’s article “The OS Doesn’t Matter…” I wrote quite simply: the future of the browser wars is he who integrates with the OS best
. This phrase came from my article lambasting Microsoft’s use of HTML for their IE9 jump lists, which caused quite a stir. In the wave of ever increasing web browser capability, the operating system is going to matter to web users more than it ever has before.
The whole reason that we can have this argument that operating systems don’t matter is that over the last 15 years the world wide web has given birth to a document interface of such staggering importance that it now overshadows the traditional desktop operating system. You can shop online, but you can’t shop from a desktop application. You can bank online, but you can’t bank from a desktop application.
The web’s innocence to be no more than a document interchange format for the Large Hadron Collider project protected it in the beginning. The web browser only needed to show a simple document, so it didn’t have to touch much of the underlying operating system (the first web authoring tool and web browser were on NeXT). Had HTML tried to replace native applications at the time it would have failed miserably, being over specced and almost certainly too slow.
It wasn’t until the popularisation of server side processing languages (particularly ASP) that saw the first “web appsâ€. Whilst the web browser still couldn’t achieve much, you could click a button and the server on the other end could technically achieve anything; send an e-mail, ring a bell, launch a rocket. This was unlike traditional desktop software which could not (and still largely doesn’t) assume it was online to be able to get anything done back at the company. Even the Internet phenomenon of Shareware had you phoning or mailing in to purchase the product on CD.
Around 1996 laptops were beginning to become popular, gaining desktop-capable power and new levels of portability. Dial-in became all the rage and Microsoft were looking to tap into this new found portability with Exchange server.
Jim Van Eaton: Outlook Web Access – A catalyst for web evolution
Traditional web applications constantly refresh the document for just about every action. During Exchange 5.5 development in 1996/97 we used hidden frames to communicate to the server when sending messages so we wouldn’t clear the user’s document. However, we still had many frames updating during navigation of the mailbox. We also developed a Java applet for the date picker control in the calendar view to augment the user experience since DHTML on the current browsers at that time was just about non-existent. In the end we found that the applet did not meet our performance needs because virtual machine initialization was too expensive. OWA 5.5 had richer support than prior versions but it still lacked the type of experience that users get in a win32 application [,]
[,] The first DHTML prototype for OWA was written on top of a pre-beta version of IE5. IE5 was such a huge improvement. IE4 was a great step forward and we did evaluate it but IE5 had many other built-in technologies that let us improve the user experience. The IE5 browser could certainly absorb xml but making a DAV request was impossible from the browser, so we added an ActiveX control to the prototype that made it possible to make DAV requests such as SEARCH, PROPFIND, etc, The OWA prototype was demo’d to Billg and he loved it. This gave us enough momentum to get a component that we needed to be installed by IE5 that we called XMLHTTP. XMLHTTP was born and implemented by the OWA dev effort of Shawn Bracewell. Exchange funded the effort by having OWA development build XMLHTTP in partnership with the Webdata team in SQL server.
(well judged given the Java lawsuit in late 1997)
Now whilst this didn’t integrate the HTML document into the operating system any more than had before, it laid the foundations for web sites that were no longer a collection of interlinked documents. Microsoft, who I rag on for failing to understand the web, did however understand the web from the perspective of developers and businesses (just not users) and were bang on to ride the crest of the crazy dot-com bubble that was just gaining momentum and culminated in 2000. The bubble essentially meant that a lot of people with not very many skills were paid very many monies to create websites. The majority of users were still on dial-up well beyond the dot com bubble (remember when you paid monthly and per minute?) yet Flash intros and tons of images were common.
What we got out of this was a massive commercial drive and the necessary momentum to push dowdy banks who didn’t want to risk payments on the Internet into opening their arms to Internet patrons and all their lovely smelling money. This I believe to be (in hindsight, as it could not have been seen at the time) the killer feature that finally gave the web a capability that was more practical than its desktop counterparts. Even if the web could look like and smell like a desktop app (as soon as DHTML appeared there were numerous attempts at mimicking desktop UI) as long as it couldn’t do any trick that couldn’t be done better on the desktop, it was going nowhere. Shopping changed that. It was easier to design, build and update a catalogue of items through a web browser than it was to write a dowdy C++ Win32 database front end application, distribute it on CD and require the user to phone their order in. There was no fun in that and that model was reserved for telephone directories and large B2B purchasing systems.
Despite the splash screens, spaghetti HTML code and a total and utter lack of web optimisation techniques in use at the time, it’s dial-up we have to to thank for having a web where we can purchase anything in an instant and then go check your balance from the comfort of your home without having to survive yet another phone tree—neither the shops or banks had an ounce of innovation in them to put together such systems, oh no. It was necessity that was the mother of this creation. Because you can’t use the phone at the same time as dial-up, it necessitated that payment had to be done online. The user could have done a mail-order, or hung-up and phoned in the order, but this would put a huge burden on the systems developers (and their lack of skills) to store this state information. The browser session was quick, simple and cheap to use rather than store shopping carts for a month waiting for a nebulous cheque in the post to match it up with. If it were not for dial-up and the dot-com bubble, it could be argued that online purchasing would not have taken off until the iTunes store in 2003, scary thought.
Now, it should be noted that megacorps have no taste and it doesn’t matter how ugly something is, if it does the job, it shall be so. Design aficionados may contort in disgust at the crappiest web app replacing a finally crafted native app, but during, and after the dot-com bubble a skills change occurred in business (from all the mass hiring and sudden rush for people to retrain to jump on the bandwagon) such that internally, big-business was both locked into, and could only think in terms of ill-conceived web apps (that plague many institutions to this day, including the British government). The IE-only intranet was born. This is the change that caused web apps to be developed instead of native ones, as usually would be the case; beginning their life within the enterprise before the concept leaked out to the end-user in new forms.
Then things went quiet.
We all know about those five years of web stagnation and the meteoric rise of Firefox.
Microsoft’s business plan was to provide IE as a loss-leader to achieve two things:
Increase developer dependence on Internet Explorer so as to tie the web specifically to Windows and therefore sell more copies of Windows in the long term [,]
Sell more copies of Visual Studio for developers to take advantage of ActiveX, which offered everything HTML couldn’t
The web got where it was in 2003 (99% IE usage) because the web wasn’t Microsoft’s business. The web was a loss-leader, nothing else. The web sold copies of Windows and Visual Studio, end of. That is evident from the total and complete lack of major upgrades to IE6 for five years.
This is interesting because the bundling of IE with Windows, a total IE monopoly, and ActiveX is the exact opposite of OS integration! Microsoft wanted to keep the web, the web (as Apple are doing now)—a quirky document-centric format sand-boxed within the browser that could never come close to replacing traditional apps, especially Microsoft’s then new love-child .NET.
A website being tied to a particular operating system is not OS integration. You would not call it OS integration that Adobe don’t have a Linux version of their products.
Because the web started out as a document format it had no concept of being specific to an OS (it was designed to solve the problem of document portability across the various OSes at use in scientific institutions at the time) and therefore when the browser was hacked and extended to be an application interface, the browser naturally smoothed over the differences between operating systems. I’m telling you all this lengthy history gumpf because it’s the reason why we so dismissively state that the operating system doesn’t matter so much because ‘everything’s on the web’ now.
What we are doing is brushing aside the fact that the web browser—because of many driving factors, wanted or not—has been pushing a ‘good enough’ (but not great) user experience along at a break-neck pace. As web-users did not need to download and install a piece of software for each company they visited on the web to be able to experience their services, the browser was hacked to make the best use of this one winning factor over desktop software, even though it failed to make the best use of OS-conventions and technologies to provide a great user experience (what did big-business care?).
The web is now about great user experience. With coming up on 2 billion people on the web, changing the wording of a button can double profits. Having your site run 10% slower can lose you millions in revenue. The design, experience, and speed of web apps is now a tangible, money-in-the-bank, competitor-busting factor. Despite many of the ‘advanced’ techniques we have now for website optimisation being perfectly applicable 10 years ago, now businesses can smell the money and therefore it’s become important to listen to those who have been rallying the call since the beginning.
Good user-experience goes hand in hand with the expectations, features and the interface paradigm of the operating system. One cannot simply take a document interface that was designed with no other perception than desktop mouse-clicks and just simply tack touch-controls onto it. Apple ditched Flash on iOS for not only technical reasons, but also that it was so utterly obtuse to the radical departure from the desktop that the iPhone embraced. Because Flash had to live in a plugin prison, the user had to interact with it in special ways outside of the reliable[-ish] behaviour designed to exist throughout the whole OS. It sucked, simply put, and sucky experience is lost revenue, not just for the website owner but for Apple and their ability to pitch the device. Consider this: it was a better choice in Apple’s opinion [sales, revenue] to exclude Flash and ask authors to change the whole web than it was to get the Flash experience on iPhone to an acceptable point. Other handsets have Flash, sure. It sucks. Turning it off is the best thing you can do to improve your phone’s operation and your web browsing experience. Apple were the only ones to say that ‘good enough’ is not good enough for them.
In a surprising role-reversal (which is covered more in the article Will Apple Embrace the Web? No.) Microsoft have learnt to stop fighting the web and instead embrace it. They have been so far behind other browsers that they have lost the ability to string their technologies together in the same way that allowed AJAX to come into existence. Internet Explorer 9 is to support HTML5 and a slew of related technologies and standards as cutting edge as can be implemented cleanly and reliably.
Of course super slick, fast HTML5 web apps directly draw developers away from coding specifically for Windows technologies in order to target more than one browser (and by extension: OS). In the past Microsoft beat away this threat through hard-nosed business tactics to destroy the competition and stagnate the web—not an option now, they are the hemorrhaging market share at a terrifying rate and have nothing good to leverage with IE8. This time around the solution Microsoft have come up with is to compete not on grounds of websites that only work on Windows but all websites working better on Windows.
Microsoft want the web to be the fastest, the best on IE9/Windows. Take a blind taste-test! Website looks the same in Firefox and IE9 but Microsoft want IE9 to be clearly the better choice. That’s what the hardware acceleration is all about. They are drilling the browser into the full capabilities of the operating system, tapping into APIs that would normally be the realm of desktop apps and games. The pinned sites and jump lists feature of IE9 is all about trying to make the web behave in the Windows way; applying the user-experience benefits that Microsoft advertise Windows 7 as having to the task that most users do more than anything else on their computers: browse the web.
The whole reason the operating system GUI exists–and even that there is more than one—is that there are many ways to manage more than one task happening at a time and we are still perfecting that very task. The web is no different in this regard; tabbed-browsing, not least. Managing more than one task is the domain of the OS, not the web, and the OS has every opportunity to improve how we manage our view of the web such that one way is better than another and leads to what else but sales?
Whoever makes the better user experience is going to get the users. Firefox was better than IE6, that much was obvious. Now, the margins are cut-throat and that simply supporting a standard is not going to sell hardware and software. Let us not kid ourselves that browser standards are anything but a developer feature, you could make a website using just an image map and a good many users would not know any better than if it were HTML. What matters to Microsoft and Apple is not the content of these sites any more (as was the previous browser war) but how well this content is experienced in the shape of the operating system which holds it. It would be hard to deny that the original iPhone greatly raised the bar of expectation in a mobile phone web browser. Have you used IE6 on a Windows Mobile device? Opera Mini was good, but it was still designed around the expectations of the mobile web from 2003: cHTML3.2. Just look at how Opera Mini changed in version 4 and 5 (zoomed out view, page panning, tabs). It takes its queues from a new kind of mobile web that Apple pointed out.
Why was the iPhone browser good? It behaved and reacted in a way that was totally sympathetic to the operating system and hardware. That’s OS integration, and it’s the future.
Windows Mobile was so trying to be a desktop environment it even had a woefully bad ‘right-click’. Opera Mini, trying to be the same browser for every phone, couldn’t offer the best of what the phone had to offer (blame going not to Opera but the blind handset manufacturers and their totally crippled Java implementations).
With standards support beginning to align in the browsers, as far as I can see at this time all browsers basically look the same (tabs on top) and do the same (back, forward, search) so the only way to be different, to gain users and to make money, is going to be providing the best experience through OS integration. Web apps need to start feeling more like web apps and less like web pages because their desktop counterparts enjoy all sorts of OS hugs-and-kisses that the web lacks. Microsoft saw that in IE9 and I believe it to be only just the beginning of Microsoft’s plans to out-fox the competition by doing ‘the Windows way’ better than they do. The good thing is that that no longer has to mean IE-only websites 🙂
The OS matters now more than it has ever done so before. It has been completely ignored by the web for 10 years and now it’s become relevant, meaningful. More people are using operating systems to view the web than ever before. The quality of their experience matters in real, tangible terms that businesses understand.
The operating system is not dead yet, it’s just been waiting for its time to really shine.
This article was originally published on camendesign.com, is licenced under a creative-commons attribution 3.0 licence, and republished here in full with Kroc’s permission.
If the OS didn’t matter, then there would be no OS wars. Windows, GNU/Linux, MacOS, none of it would matter and everyone could switch to GNU/Linux in a blink of an eye. But that doesn’t happen. And people still buy Apple hardware because of MacOS. The OS will always matter.
Edit: Oops, didn’t meant to reply to the first comment
I think what JLG was really trying to say in his article is that the underlying kernel doesn’t matter any more… and that everything hinges on the UI toolkit and above.
As he pointed out in his article, OSX and iOS are pretty much the same underlying OS – and essentially UNIX-compliant, similar to Linux, Android, WebOS, etc.
He then goes on to point out that Windows is not UNIX, and thus the “other option”.
In short, the only real differentiator any more is the UI/User Experience.
Edited 2010-10-06 17:59 UTC
I don’t believe that’s the case–that’s just giving up on innovation. There is no way we have run out of ideas on how to get a circuit to do stuff. The more everybody accepts that they can’t change what is simply a given, the more room there is for the upstart to try something new.
The fact that this is 2010 and we still don’t have widespread transactional file systems or metadata indexing is perfect proof that there is more to be done on the low level parts.
Though ultimately, the what the user sees is all that matters. The point is, a bad base OS will make it impossible to have a perfect user experience.
Well I think Urias has a point; the general tenure of your article feels as though you have only read JLG’s title, disagreed with that statement, and started to write an article focused solely on that statement, without stopping to discover that the article really is about all OSes turning into variations on UNIX or having UNIX at their cores, except for one brave little village of Gauls resisting UNIX from invading on their territory.
Even in your comment just now, it feels to me like you haven’t even considered JLG’s arguments. He speaks of various expressions of the UNIX core, be it Chrome OS or the Mac OS, Android or iOS. How are they “giving up on innovation”?!?! To disprove your point, let me also go back in time; the rise of DOS can be explained by its low pricing, but using the UNIX philosophy is a conscious choice by all companies who decided to go for their own Linux distribution, for creating an OS from scratch with UNIX underpinnings (BeOS), or for replacing their existing OS with a UNIX-based one (NeXT, and various smartphones). All the way up to the highly praised QNX, innovation is achieved through a single foundation all companies (except one) have come to agree upon, sometimes after years of deliberation: UNIX. That is not giving up on innovation; it is acknowledging the wheel has already been invented and you can create any kind of vehicle or machinery around said wheel.
Will we witness a sea change in the way we interact with the Web through our OSes? To an extent, yes I believe we will. Solely for that reason, Apple cannot afford to lag behind, which is also why I did partially disagree with your “Apple won’t embrace the Web” article ( http://www.osnews.com/permalink?427209 ) as I myself am more optimistic about this age of Web competition preventing a return of the days of IE6. In fact, that is why I hope the OS integration with the Web, which you speak of, will happen on a large scale. And I do thank you for pointing that out in this article.
The OS itself just matters to a small number of people.
Most people just want the applications (or websites in this case) to (just) work.
Only fan boys (I’m on the side of Linux myself) and the creators of the OS itself really care.
People care that when they switch their computer on it starts quickly, doesn’t randomly decide to stop working and that when they click things they happen in a responsive way. The OS matters in all the ways the consumer is not aware are happening under the hood. They don’t want to be confused by meaningless dialogues, they don’t want their machine to bombard them with interruptions that get in the way of what they want to do. It is the OSes job to make the operation of the computer easy and enjoyable and matters a whole lot.
If the OS didn’t matter, you’d be typing in binary code by hand.
Hey, that’d make keyboards less complex and cheaper. The only keys you would need would be 0, 1, Backspace, Delete, Enter, a few directional (arrow) keys, and maybe Escape. Maybe throw in a Ctrl and Alt key as added value so we can use our Delete key to its fullest potential.
It might not be very pleasant to use, though.
OS matters because of the OS, not because of the browser only. Windows will not gain much advantage with hardware acceleration – it is available on all modern OSes, including Linux and MacOSX.
BTW, Firefox team is also focused on hardware acceleration, see for example http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/
The mention of hardware acceleration is simply that Microsoft are making best use of Windows API, without that necessitating IE-only websites—a good thing.
Mozilla I think are going to face some real challenges in the near future. They haven’t understood native behaviour as well as the other browsers. Safari and Camino behave *far* more natively on the Mac, and this does matter in the small details. Just simple things like using the system-wide dictionary, auto-correct and system services.
The more a browser can behave native to the operating system, the more this is going to matter as HTML starts to touch the hardware.
Agreed… though I’ll be curious to see what ends up happening with notifications on Linux. Firefox 3.6 still hasn’t merged the patch Ubuntu uses to send its notifications via libnotify and I’m not sure about Firefox 4.
Perhaps more interesting, when they implemented the notifications for web apps, Google specifically justified implementing their own notification system with “OS-native mechanisms like libnotify aren’t powerful enough.” …which I can understand as a developer (especially given Ubuntu’s efforts to design a more crippled notification daemon), but I’m not sure I can excuse as an end user.
Well, even Camino isn’t completely native. It integrates fairly well, but it too suffers from the long-standing firefox bug that prevents a Mac from going to sleep if you leave it idle. This is why I stick to Safari, because it doesn’t have this problem. With Safari, I can set my MacBook Pro down and forget about it, and it’ll go to sleep automatically. With Firefox and Camino, it’ll run the battery down. (And I have one of the 2007-2008 MPBs that ruins batteries, so mine just suddenly powers off at some random point when it gets below 20%, and I lose work.)
I didn’t get your point at first. Firefox 4.0 has just as good hardware acceleration as IE9, (when it include Jaegermonkey) at least as good Javascript if not faster,
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/technology/#feature-perfo…
slightly better standards compliance and better support for emerging standards such as CSS3, and equivalent features such as Panorama and Apps Tab.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/features/#feature-apps-ta…
But Firefox has all kinds of extra features as well
It has WebGL and Animated PNGs as graphics features:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/technology/#feature-graph…
It has geolocation, Orientation and Multitouch support
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/technology/#feature-devic…
In addition it has behind-the-scenes features such as web worker threads. As always, Firefox will still have XUL, giving it the largest extensions library of any browser.
Personally, I am of the view that other browsers on any OS will have trouble matching the features and performance of Firefox 4.0.
But at the same time Mozilla are really struggling to make a good web browser on mobile devices because it doesn’t ‘fit’. They practically don’t exist in that market. N900, and that’s it. The Android port thus far has been horribly slow and clunky. OS fit and finish matters here, where before XUL could get away with lacking polish.
I can agree OS integration is a key for success, but I can’t agree it’s the primary key. I’m pretty sure some web browsers offers more features than others, and that’s what matters for me, these features are present in any OS and that’s what I like.
We can conclude unique features are the way of getting users, but the fact is actually web browsers are used because of their company ads or because some are bundled to the OS from factory and many people don’t realize others exists.
Chromium OS, or Peppermint Linux both have interesting approaches in that they the see web browser as central. I don’t think they diminish the importance of the OS, they instead seem to aim for a more integrated system. The OS still matters, but it can be less visible. Instead of building a browser to integrate with the OS they build the OS around the browser.
I mean to people like us who go to the more technically inclined sites we sort of care about the OS but not that much. If you will succeed in one then you will likely succeed in any environment. But for the consumer I think that they are reacting indifferently to an OS that has failed them and I can qualify that with the question of how many of us have experienced or heard of a windows horror story.
What I see is that people in general want the OS to be helpful and stable and transparent. So that they can get on the Web and watch a video and send some emails. The OS is not something that they want to think about, that is what engineers and technicians do, there is a plain assertion that there is only the two principal OS environments Windows and Unix\Unix-Like. And with the lack of innovation in games, where the market has chosen games that are fun (the Wii) as opposed to expensive but pretty games with low replay value(ridiculous shooters). In the same way that I do not want to think about what embedded SW is in my fuel injectors, I just want to drive. I am not trying to squeeze 15 HP here or there with polished headers or a cold-air intake, but to a car nut that matters. Windows or Mac or Linux, Firefox or Chrome do not matter to most of my family most of the time or even most of my clients and I am ashamed to say this but even some of my tech friends. So I do not think that the OS is dead per se. It will always be there but what I do see is an increasing reliance on the browser. At work many tasks are run on a citrix session in a browser, or as a web app front end to a data store somewhere else. The reasons and benefits are clear you patch an web app in one place or upgrade and add features to all of the users at once.
Look at the plummeting market share of MSIE and that is what only runs on windows. That is where the relevance of windows has gone. That OS and work stay in the office. Because of the emergence of the MacOS in the VIP space, weather they need it or not – if it is just a prestige/vanity item the web app still has to work. Or to reduce two paragraphs into a simple way of looking at it is, if you are not chasing specs and numbers – fastest CPU burliest GPU biggest HDD then all I want is an OS that works, keeps working and stays out of my way. Windows has failed in that space.
Facebook and twitter and who knows what comes next these are what people think is important. And in that context any decent browser should be able to take on the world. That this browser is not Microsoft Internet Explorer, well that is just icing on the cake.
How can it (IE) be declining in relevance when IE has MORE users today than it had when it was at 99% of the market.
DO NOT let market share be used to lie to you!!!
Let’s rub a couple brain cells together and go over what share really means. It comes down to a question people don’t ask when they hear a percentage and should; “A percentage of WHAT?”
Let’s make this easy and compare 2005 to 2008. We have pretty concrete numbers to play with in that range. Besides, it’s the most up to date numbers available on google public data, and the wikipedia usage article.
In 2005 IE had roughly 90% of the market still. If you take the time to look at percentage of the world population that was online at the time you find out that 15.9% was online. The population was then 6.46 billion, so that’s 1.027 billion people online.
In 2008 IE had roughly 70% of the market… at the same time the percent of population online had grown to 23.9% and the world population had grown to 6.69 billion, so that’s 1.59 billion.
90% of 1.027 billion is 924.3 million.
70% of 1.59 billion is 1.113 billion
So while “losing” 20% market share, the number of IE users grew by 189 million.
Current guesstimates put the % of world population online at 34% (given the steady trend of increasing penetration since 2005) and the world population at 6.873 billion, for 2.33 billion.
51.34% (wikipedia’s number) of 2.33 billion is 1.19 billion.
Meaning that while dropping from 70% to 51.34% IE gained 77 million new users!!!
Meaning IE is just as relevant as it was five years ago or even ten years ago!
You figure in things like FF’s prefetch artificially inflating it’s market share, users smart enough to use other browsers getting counted more than once because of all the different devices they use to get online (like me since I get counted for Opera four times – work, home, road laptop, bedside laptop), and those percentages become even shakier.
Basically, most of the people who were using IE five years ago are still using it today… and more people are using it than ever!
DO NO LET SHARE PERCENTAGES BE USED TO PROPAGATE A LIE!
— edit — oops, I may have misunderstood your post. Did you mean the OS? You’re not very clear on that.
Edited 2010-10-07 01:14 UTC
IMHO the browser-only computing is a real scenario, but it is not a too good thing. In this case the Chromium will kill windows, macos, desktop linux, etc. You can buy 10$ laptop with Chomium – but you cannot use it without a google account…
The web computing make people very-very vulnerable. With a real computer with windows or linux your depenency on software vendors limited to purchase or upgrade time. You can use pirated software (not too nice, but real alternative). With web applications your dependency is continous: the vendor can kick off from the system at any time. The web based computing is the opposite of the spirit of open-source.
Not unless open source sees the need and changes things. Why should remotely storing and accessing data mean that you should give your data to a company? Self-hosted web apps should be the norm.
hear, hear !
Thank you for that one.
Some say the Linux-powered $US 100 wall-plug will be that device which will do the self-hosting (with a backup with the data encrypted of course).
With the whole mobile thing now getting really interesting, I’ve been thinking maybe it’s actually a mobile device which will do this.
Who knows, interesting times.
I agree 100% with that statement.
However much that really *should* be the case, it won’t be the case. Most people would have to come to the conclusion that the convenience of using an existing service like Google’s various services are not worth the lack of privacy . Unless, someone makes a cheap web server as easy to administer. Like its built into your cable/dsl modem and works as easy and painless as wifi/dhcp.
Opera has already gone that way with Opera Unite. I can access my files from wherever I am in the world, stream my music to whatever computer I’m using (until the music industry finds out about this and criminalizes me). Of course, that server runs inside the Opera browser. I know nothing about the security of it in terms of access (I mean someone trying to read my files). I don’t know whether the app and infrastructure are not doing something nasty behind my back such as logging my passwords… But I guess it’s no different from entering the same passwords in the browser.
you forgot “when they work fine” at the end of the sentence 🙂
Just a quick note:
‘It wasn’t until the popularisation of server side processing languages (particularly ASP) that saw the first “web appsâ€.’
Euh, many people were already using Perl for this years before that.
But ASP brought server-side to the mindless Microsofties of the dot-com boom, which was my point. It wasn’t about who did it first, it’s who made it easy enough for unskilled people to clobber together something that works. There’s no way you could say that Perl was as peachy easy as ASP.
Yeah, I guess unskilled and Perl don’t mix that well. 🙂
I see your point.
Edited 2010-10-06 20:47 UTC
That didn’t stop them from mixing
Cleaned up a few of those messes in my day.
The editor of HTML5 (Ian Hickson) has created a draft specification for HTML-applications to get access to devices. Which means you won’t need anymore plugins (read:currently Flash) for a webapplication to get access to the webcam.
Or you can make a webapplication which can read directly from a barcode reader:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/video-conferencing-with-the-html5-devic…
http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-device/
Why not upload your photos directly from your USB-connected camera through the webbrowser into the Photoshop-like webapp ?
(yes, yes, all with: grant this web page/domain access to device-X interface ofcourse)
Edited 2010-10-06 20:55 UTC
There’s also experimentation going on with `<input type=”camera” />` and `<input type=”speech” />`. This is exactly where OS integration and native-UI totally matter.
If these tags really get added to the browser, I doubt there will be much of a GUI.
That is the whole point, the browser is the UI.
Even before any webpads (I’m not talking about the iPad, I’m talking about, long, long ago) I was thinking one device which connects to the Internet is really all we need.
Next think on my list of things that still need to be ‘invented’ is a good API for the user to say, please copy this file from web-application X to web-application Y.
Now that we have oAuth, etc. it might start to happen.
Edited 2010-10-06 22:08 UTC
Maybe I am just too old fashioned, but to me web-constrained (cloud) computing is a step backwards in terms of usability and user experience (perhaps several steps). Until usability in web applications improves to a level where it can at least challenge the user experience of existing OSes, I would rather do my computing on the ground than in the clouds. In all my ignorance, I have the feeling it is going to take quite a while before that happens…
It is probably true, it will take time. Even W3C announced today, the full HTML5-specification is still years away from being finished. Not that this won’t prevent developers from using it anyway. 🙂
“Why the OS Doesn’t Matter”, an article written by a man who created an OS that, in the end, didn’t matter.
[j/k]
… there are several factual errors – more like unintended revisionism at work – in the article that are distracting.
The first thing that bugged me was the statement that ASP should be credited for the coming of the more “sophisticated” web pages when that is plain not true! As already addressed by Lennie, if anything that honor should go to Perl that, despite not being created specifically for it, served us very well during the early years of the web as the engine behind (in?) famous CGI-enabled websites.
Even though Perl is definitely not a beginner’s language (no arguments there!), the web is still littered to this day with Perl scripts repositories with clear and concise directions about how to deploy pretty much anything ranging from visit counters to chat scripts to CMSes and everything in between and only as of the huge explosion of PHP circa PHP3 that trend slowed down a little. Been there at the time, done all of that. I had already passed through one or two ISPs at the late 90’s so I am pretty sure that ASP had nothing to do with that.
Most hosting companies had either cheap boxes running Linux/FreeBSD or, in case of big ones like the late RapidSite (nowadays part of Verio) huge datacenters with Sun machines or, ironically, SGI machines (running IRIX nonetheless) to provide shared hosting services.
Heck, MS’ own FrontPage had server extensions that were basically a bunch of Perl (and shell scripts IIRC) until the very day that it was retired!
In fact, ASP was’t even a blip on the radar until ASP3 came out. And even then, ASP was running neck to neck with PHP from a features point of view but its market share/installed base/whateveryouwannacallit was nowhere near the latter’s and for a while it seemed that its only distinctive advantage was the fact that it was heavily tied into MS tools and middleware. At that point the article starts to make sense as MS did invest heavily into providing easy to use tools to deploy websites quickly using its development tools (which happens to be MS forté, IMNSHO) which somehow boosted its presence on the data center, at least as far as web hosting is concerned.
(And yes, Kroc: I’ll concede that ease of use was probably a major concern for the hordes of Visual Basic and VBA developers out there back then but that still sounds like a stretch to me…
)
The other thing is that traditional business had absolutely nothing to do with many enhancements of the web during the late nineties. Most people agree that the porn industry (yes, I said PORN!) pushed most of the things that we take for granted today (e-commerce, filesize compression techniques for web server software, demand for faster bandwidth, etc.) and that the traditional brick and mortar businesses only took a chance on the web after witnessing the profits that those pioneers companies reaped during that time.
Once the porn industry laid down the ground rules about how to do business on the web was that most companies jumped in and it became what we know today.
But I have no peeves with the rest of the article. MS should be commended for the groundwork that led to the powerful AJAX websites that we have today even though I am pretty sure that they regret that they couldn’t figure a way to tie that to Windows and create a better mouse trap.
EDIT: Uhhh… Sorry for the huge post… :S
Edited 2010-10-06 23:50 UTC
I said in the article “particularly ASP†– as in, there certainly were server side systems before (I wouldn’t even begin to deny that), but that ASP changed the gears up because it lowered the level of access and was similar enough to VBScript / VBA / VB. Before ASP, server side was being done properly by proper engineers in Perl. What happened with the dot com boom is that a task force swept in of such size that there wasn’t enough IQ to go around and Perl was certainly not their language of choice.
For a site that is named ‘OSNews’, confusing the UI with the OS is a serious problem.
You could have said what you said with a single phrase:
“The more a web app looks like a native app the better”.
Besides the UI though, the OS has little to do with the web. In fact, it is irrelevant. You could run a web app on a Commodore 64, provided that the interface is nicely looking and simple to use/understand.