Daydreaming away to the future [LWN.net]

Daydreaming away to the future

Posted Aug 18, 2011 16:31 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
Parent article: Developments in Mozilla-land

I was in that half-sleep half-awake mode where you let your brain go off on its own, don't even ask what it's thinking about, don't try to guide it, let it work out whatever problem has been eating at you ...

... and the rest of my brain, distracted by the division, got to wondering about shells within shells .... here we have this graphical browser interface, let's make it the OS, make apps run within it ... isn't this where X started years ago, one of the motivations being to run multiple apps at once, not just pictures and plots and CAD designs, but terminals, data entry forms, news articles on web sites which are nothing but characters ... I wonder if this will evolve in a few years to a replacement for X, boot into the browser instead of X, run your apps there ... and one of them will be a web browser! ...

At what point does this concept hit 360, but in a spiral not a circle? Put us right back where we started, except one layer deeper, with no apparent benefit. It all seems so Alicey-in-Wonderlandy.

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Daydreaming away to the future

Posted Aug 19, 2011 10:55 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

You are not alone. When I see this kind of article I wonder how much of it is really new and how much is just a new set of people getting excited about an idea they don't realize is old. Goodness knows I've done that a number of times only to look at the end result and realize I've reinvented something that's existed for a decade or two.

Daydreaming away to the future

Posted Aug 20, 2011 1:52 UTC (Sat) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]

And then someone will make TCP/IP tunnels over websockets so you can connect to legacy services. And someone will run Java applets via JavaScript's canvas. And then someone will port NCSA Mosaic to JavaScript. And maybe... Oh, never mind, they already did that one:
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/05/17/0242244/Boot-Lin...