Comments on: The Web is the most successful, fantastic virtual machine

By: Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:05:21 +0000

Oh, and how much work can you still do when your Internet connection dies? I had that for a number of hours this week and even I couldn’t do a lot of things any more, and I don’t use web apps or data in the cloud as I don’t want to have others having control over my data. I could do a lot of things and work with my documents, but I’m working for and in an Internet project and my Internet connection was down, with the support line telling me it might take a day until a technician might even call me! Bummer.

By: skierpage

skierpage — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:07:32 +0000

@Chris Messina
“I question the viability of the WebOS without some kind of amazing caching/offline story.”

I’d love a heart symbol in Places for everything you’d like to cache locally, similar to the star symbol. Currently you have to manually save stuff you like, track it in Downloads instead of Places, and manually check to see if it’s been updated on the web.

By: Peter Michaux

Peter Michaux — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:05:47 +0000

I think browsers becoming more powerful is a good idea. Working towards having all user apps in the browser will certainly push the browser to become more powerful. It doesn’t mean desktop applications will disappear. The browser is a desktop application, after all.

I hope the defacto and W3C standards processes accelerate. The defacto XMLHttpRequest standard has been around for a while but the W3C is only on a “working draft” for the XMLHttpRequest. Some of the W3C working draft details are valuable ones. One of Canvas, SVG or VML hasn’t been implemented everywhere. An open video standard takes this many years? There is still a long way to go. (Un)fortunately the web is “good enough” already.

A virtual machine isn’t so great unless it is exactly the same everywhere. The new advanced features need rapid uptake so what you are writing isn’t available until 2020.

Another thing I wonder about is this everything in the cloud business. It is fine if all my data is accessed uniformly from servers but I (speaking as a regular computer user) better *own* one particular server. There is some data I won’t want to have on anyone else’s computer. Am I just stuck in old thinking? So perhaps the future means my PC is split into two: a web browser and my own data server. Perhaps they will be on the same machine but more likely they won’t. Perhaps we’ll be buying an iPhone and laptop for clients and personal web server that we can just plug in to the internet and access anywhere?

By: Kamatsu

Kamatsu — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:29:57 +0000

Interestingly, Chromium betas at least on linux already have this “priveleged tab” feature, I have all my web apps load up automatically in pinned tabs on the left hand side that just display an icon.

By: Chris Messina

Chris Messina — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:14:33 +0000

I wrote about something like this in 2006:

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/10/05/socially-networked-harddrives/

Not exactly the same thing, but you can imagine hosting everything in the cloud and finally just using “thin clients” to access these remote resources.

I find that music is a real litmus test here… With Spotify, Pandora and SimplifyMedia — I basically have music wherever I am — so long as I have a connection. It’s those times when I’m without a stable connection that I question the viability of the WebOS without some kind of amazing caching/offline story.

But it’s clear to me that we’re headed in this direction. It’s only a matter of time.

By: Brad Neuberg

Brad Neuberg — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:33:47 +0000

Interesting idea with the privileged tabs feature; reminds me of the BB feature that was recently removed from HTML 5 to install “privileged” HTML apps:

http://www.quackit.com/html_5/tags/html_bb_tag.cfm

Never could quite understand what BB stood for though.

I’m still blown away at how most users don’t know what web browsers are. Do you think it makes sense to do a general marketing campaign to raise awareness of what web browsers are amongst the general public, as well as make them desirable? Other industries have done this; Nike made “tennis shoes” both a generally understood item and desirable, for example. I wonder if that could help bring Firefox and other open source browsers greater awareness and use amongst the general public. I’ve never seen the Mozilla Foundation attempt to raise broad awareness of what a browser is and why you should care that you have a good one; that would be cool to do a creative, viral marketing campaign on that.