Mozilla Labs has introduced its concept of a desktop replacement called Webian Shell. The Webian Shell basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and where the web applications are given more importance than the native applications.
No wasted space. Fast. Simple. Lots of missing functionality but this makes a nice web terminal.
Posted from Webian
I tried it, ohh man.
Yes, lots of missing features.
Like simple middle mouse button* for opening a link in a new tab AND mouse right click* didn’t work either so no menu to choose ‘open in tab’ from.
* for me in Linux atleast
Edited 2011-06-08 22:21 UTC
Actually, this has nothing to do with Mozilla apart from the use of their technology as a platform:
The Webian project is a not-for-profit venture founded by Ben Francis. Ben is a full time software engineer at a startup in Cambridge (England).
http://webian.org/about/
It’s not a Mozilla Labs project.
Edited 2011-06-08 22:42 UTC
Right.. http://mozillalabs.com/chromeless/2011/05/31/webian-shell-a-full-sc…
See here Webian’s release announcement : http://webian.org/blog/2011/05/31/announcing-webian-shell-01-2/
They make it pretty clear that the project is only *featured* on Mozilla Labs, but that it does not come from there.
Why are so many people obsessed with using the web for everything? I write web apps for a living, I spend my days swimming in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I even defended web apps the other day in another comment. But let’s face it, from a developer standpoint, it’s a crappy platform!
Bingo!
The web has it’s place, does it really need to replace everything?
Take for example the “talk” about Windows 8: Seriously, HTML5/JS for UI? How is this better than a good clean native API?
What am I missing?
Edited 2011-06-09 01:01 UTC
its the future man, html is on the cloud man
The fact that our beloved industry is foremost driven by buzz.
In the IT world there is a pendulum where technology embracing swings from one extreme to another and then settles somewhere in the middle. Take Flash when it was first released, it was used and misused with horrible splash screens, over the top animations which then resulted in a backlash against Flash but now we’re moving into the phase where, “Flash is ok if you don’t abuse it. Use it where you need to but don’t over use it”. Same for manage code, it was vilified then it was over embraced then the market moved its way back to the middle where there is a happy medium between managed and yet giving developers the power if they want to step out of the sandbox.
In the case of Microsoft, they’re already late to the party – Apple and WebOS (Palm) already went through the ‘Web Apps rule the world” when they were first launched but now both have realised that web apps have their place but people still want native applications. Microsoft is still stuck in that first phase, they think that web apps will rule the world but hopefully by the time Windows 8 is launched they would have moved beyond that and realised that ‘Web Technologies’ aren’t the swiss army knife for multi-platform development.
I think a HTML/XUL combination for the UI and JS for the logic behind it is pretty great, because it’s easy to pick up and is high level enough so we don’t have to worry about things like memory allocation and strong and static typing like we did 30 years ago. We’ve come far enough that we shouldn’t have to fiddle with such arcane concepts. Instead we can focus on what’s really important: being creative and getting more stuff done in the same amount of time.
On the flipside, I’m not really convinced that the current JS implementations are suitable for desktop applications. Someone should first make a proper JS compiler.
Oh man, I guess I’m a pretty good time traveller, spending a lot of my time 30 years back every day B] These arcane concepts make your shiny JS-world go’round young one
Preach!!!
Eh, not really young, I’ve done a lot of DOS programming in the 90s, and had to deal with all this. Those were not good times. I’d rather change jobs completely than deal with these concepts again.
As time goes by and we have more and more processing power we can afford to abstract all the low level stuff. Isn’t it better to just work with ideas and not get lost in unnecessary implementation details?
Oh man, I guess I’m a pretty good time traveller, spending a lot of my time 30 years back every day B] These arcane concepts make your shiny JS-world go’round young one
If someone would bother to write a decent JS compiler you could completely rewrite my “shiny JS world” with it. My guess is that people are comfortable with what they know and speaking against entrenched concepts will get you labeled as a fool before anyone even considers the merit of your ideas.
Edited 2011-06-09 21:52 UTC
… I mean : Remember the old-fashioned “Thin Client vs Fat Client” ? Do you ?
;-P
Dont be a school kid and go flaming me on this.
Didn’t MS do this with IE-4. DOJ slapped a law suit for wrong competitive practice. Had they continued (ensuring it was kept a little open standard we would have had a lot better desktop.