On one hand, the browser strives to be the universal OS shell, much like a Smalltalk environment before it, and a Lisp environment before that. Everything is scriptable, everything is inspectable, everything is written is a universal high-level language.
The browser seems to have everything that's needed, and ChromeOS is basically built on that idea.
The limiting factors though are performance and compatibility. Even with a JIT compiler, both JS and WASM are pretty wasteful, resource-wise. Because of that, you cannot just compile MS Excel to WASM; you'd have to bring half of Win32 APIs, DCOM, and tons of libraries to it, too. While technically it's not impossible, the result would be quite sluggish at best.
And if you have to run native-code apps anyway, why your Python CLI shouldn't be a native app, too?
On one hand, the browser strives to be the universal OS shell
Then there is no need for the browser. We can download an app and run it on a portable VM on any hardware. Or am I missing something?
I thought the whole point of the browser was to use HTTP to fetch HTML and CSS and render them. With a few sprinkle of some scripting language to manipulate the DOM and make things interactive when needed.
But why would still need a browser if everything becomes an app? Another layer of abstraction and virtualisation will just waste time and incur hardware costs.
Comments
On one hand, the browser strives to be the universal OS shell, much like a Smalltalk environment before it, and a Lisp environment before that. Everything is scriptable, everything is inspectable, everything is written is a universal high-level language.
The browser seems to have everything that's needed, and ChromeOS is basically built on that idea.
The limiting factors though are performance and compatibility. Even with a JIT compiler, both JS and WASM are pretty wasteful, resource-wise. Because of that, you cannot just compile MS Excel to WASM; you'd have to bring half of Win32 APIs, DCOM, and tons of libraries to it, too. While technically it's not impossible, the result would be quite sluggish at best.
And if you have to run native-code apps anyway, why your Python CLI shouldn't be a native app, too?
Then there is no need for the browser. We can download an app and run it on a portable VM on any hardware. Or am I missing something?
I thought the whole point of the browser was to use HTTP to fetch HTML and CSS and render them. With a few sprinkle of some scripting language to manipulate the DOM and make things interactive when needed.
But why would still need a browser if everything becomes an app? Another layer of abstraction and virtualisation will just waste time and incur hardware costs.
You cannot just compile MS Excel to WASM, because it is a legacy enterprise monstrosity.