It's an O/S, it's a Browser

It used to be that the mainframe held all of our data and did all of our work for us. Life was good.

Then the PC O/S was king. Applications that needed data went back to a server somewhere and got it. We called it client-server programming and life was still good.

Now we're running everything inside of a browser that's controlled by content sent from a server. "The web IS the operating system," Google tells us. If you don't understand that? Well then you are back in the dark ages, off the boat, adrift in the ocean, pulling on Superman's cape, etc. Heck, we're starting to see browsers with full-featured Operating Systems: little windows and files and menus and the whole shebang.You do your work on the browser, but the code and the data lives somewhere else. The browser IS the operating system, and life is good.

But let's say you wanted to write something with as much flash and sizzle as possible. You'd like 3-D graphics, ray-tracing, user interaction wtih high-computational overhead. What's the best way to do that?

There are all kinds of browser-based tools out there. Flash, Silverlight, Java, VRML. But while there's all kinds of solutions, you're 1) always working through 3 or 4 layers of crap (Tool, Javascript, Browser, O/S) to get to the CPU, and 2) There are distressingly long load times for some of the coolest stuff, like Java or Flash.

Wouldn't it be great if all of that load time could be eliminated? Where the main part of your code could already be on the computer and when the user clicks the button it all starts happening instantly?

Well we could always go back to client-server programming. Heaven knows we've been there and done that. But then how about accessing your data no matter where you're at? How about cross-platform compatibility? Aren't we just locking ourselves into a certain vendor (MS)?

Here's a thought: if the browser is the operating system, maybe the operating system is also the browser. That is, I can write Windows apps with the intention that Windows is simply the display mechanism for my web application. When users go to my site, they download the code for whatever version of windows they are using, but only that first time. From then on, there's zero load time. The data lives on the server, and it's served up as standard validated XML. Over time, other clients can be written that consume and create the XML, meaning that Windows might be your first browser, but you can expand to others later on.

Oddly enough, Google is doing this with their Google-Pack. It's just a bunch of Windows programs. If this trend continues, look for the O/S to become very cheap or free. After all, it's just a platform to share and participate in the larger World Wide Web O/S. The O/S has become the browser. Life is good.

I know this has been observed before; I'm not the first by any means to call this out. What amazes me is how quickly we all fall into a herd mentality -- one way or the other -- without taking time to think things through a bit. It's the edge cases that are the most interesting, and it's the larger pattern of swinging back and forth that needs to be understood in order to do long-term planning. Meanwhile, is the browser the O/S? Or is the O/S the browser?