> The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.
Marc Andreessen said famously (or at least is paragraphed as saying) in 1994 that the "Browser is the Operating System" and people have been doing riffs on that since then.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/22/always...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/09/software-...
This was also the idea behind Chromebooks:
> Marc Andreessen said famously (or at least is paragraphed as saying) in 1994 that the "Browser is the Operating System" and people have been doing riffs on that since then.
Isn't that downstream of Sun Microsystems’ old slogan: The Network is the Computer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer
AFAICT, Sun’s underlying vision was more on the side of pervasive RPC and/or downloadable code, i.e. closer to DCOM or NeWS than HTTP.
(We have in fact ultimately ended up layering downloadable code on top of HTTP. I don’t think I like the results, yet some of the things I don’t like seem inherent to downloadable code in general.)
It was more than this. The Sun Ray thin clients were so frigging impressive.
The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was it was SUN. It ran on Sun Hardware, with Sun Software and all at Sun Prices. Metaframe was just so much cheaper (it was also hot garbage but thats another story).
Given that, in the back of every customer's mind, across all segments, they cannot allow one vendor to have or exert too much control, it is a wonder why any company would seek to own a platform to such an extent. The better and more integrated you get, the more of a risk you become.
And of course I'm speaking on the context of what I'm building, not the world we're in. There are plenty of platforms that are more important than what they platform. I believe it was Bill Gates that said the value of all the things on the platform must exceed the platform itself. We have some inversions at present that are ripe to undergo Rayleigh–Taylor instability.
Really? Most businesses leave their eternal soul and their firstborn in the care of Microsoft, with no backup plan. I just don't buy this.
Microsoft is not just Microsoft. It's the cottage industry around products like Excel. It's all the other PC applications. It's WHQL getting hardware vendors into the fold. Compare all that to Apple. Apple is big, but not compared to the greater continent of Microsoft. People are more concerned about Apple's walled gardens than Microsoft's. It's no coincidence that Apple has taken more heavy handed actions to rule their platform more. That is why their platform is smaller overall and why people don't trust them.
Sometime I said to myself. If I hacked someone's PC, his hard drive will become my NAS.
Sometimes there isn't a reason why a product fails to find broad product adoption. If you take VC money, you need a mega hit. Sometimes, all you find is a niche.
Which is why tactics are so important. I would say no one has actually got the experience right yet, 'browser is the OS' has been true for a long time, and no one has delivered it yet.
Similar to ambient computing and augmented reality.
One might suggest Cromebooks have done so well because Google got it more or less right.
I think Chromebooks have done so well because they're cheap and are purchased for locked down environments (education and people who really don't want complexity). Even then, I think they kind of demonstrate that the browser is NOT the OS because users and Google still felt the need to break out of the browser box, with both Android apps and Linux application support.
The browser is the OS that wraps the user not the machine. Just as Linux or Windows or Android wrap the machine and manage its resources, the browser should wrap the user and manage their resources (data, time/focus etc). In this regard nobody has succeeded. The browser isn’t finished until it achieves this
I think that they had the fact that in chromebook, they could run whole linux containers in the browser , right?
> no one has delivered it yet
Firefox OS? Now KaiOS? The 3rd most popular mobile OS.
They say the browser is the OS, and yet eww is only one small part of Emacs.
Isn't that because eww refuses to implement JavaScript? Which isn't very e/acc of them?
In 1994 the browser was not an operating system, was an hyperlink media app. JavaScript was born in 1995 and for years was “only” used for modifying the colors of HTML buttons on a mouse-over.