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Comment by zz865 | Hacker News Reader

Its scary we're heading towards a situation where everything is done in a browser. Maybe Chromeos really is the future.

If you think about it, browser is just an OS for the apps that have crappiest stack (typesetting engine from 80s and, well, javascript), weird window manager (full-window tabs), sandbox for everything (including TCP/UDP calls) and no apps distribution process whatsoever – you download app each time you want to use it.

Why people are excited about this OS, I don't know :)

The OS is free, easy to install and runs on mobile too...

Start disecting how the brain works and its very similar one stack of garbage hacks on top of another constantly accumulating over time.

I’d like something more dependable and user-friendly than my brain though.

> sandbox for everything

IMO, This is the best thing about browser as an OS. You can run untrusted apps and know that it couldn't steal your ssh keys or other things without your consent, similar to iOS and Android.

Yes its the best thing about a browser when your laptop has valuable stuff on it.

When all your data is on a server its like you dont need a sandbox any more. :)

There are more benefits with the browser sandbox than just plain old file access. Web apps can’t just read the clipboard or enter scripts/commands or take screenshots or activate webcam and microphone

For all practical purposes, file system sandbox features might actually be the first to become meaningless again when more and more data is stored in offline browser caches

And application delivery in enterprise environments is also much more lightweight compared to VDI solutions like Citrix so there’s another benefit in terms of sandbox and isolation

All of these things are secondary to a standard UI and distribution for all platforms.

Some people are excited because there's no gatekeeper taking 100 USD every year for the privilege of distributing apps on it. Also, it's quite simple to start developing for it.

For complex software (e.g. video games) on the other hand the web is a real piece of crap: performance suck, no UDP, a certain browser is purposely a ton of useful APIs (or is straight up buggy).

It's fantastic. Cloud 9 IDE has been surprisingly good at this point for many years but never really got much attention after the Amazon purchase.

Obviously it's no Visual Studio Code (not least because of the ecosystem of plugins), so it's great to see things coming along.

I used to think this was pushed by some of the large tech companies that do not have a popular OS and are forced to turn the browser effectively into an OS. But both Github and VS code are owned by Microsoft now.

Users in general (with exceptions) do not care about how and where their software runs and data is stored.

For many people internet connectivity and local computation power (within the browser) is now good enough to skip installations and updates all together.

It makes perfect sense for them to do this and in the end they are not giving up control if they still own the OS.

Microsoft can always the decide that "untrusted" websites (which, for example, are not "certified" by them) get blocked from using certain features.

They are pushing Azure Cloud OS, Microsoft's timesharing platform. :)

It smells to me like Microsoft have realised Windows is heading the way of VMS and they need an exit strategy. Its no coincidence windows 11 pro has a built in wayland compositor to go with WSL2.

At Google in 2013, many developers just used Chromebook's. I am starting a new job in a few weeks and I expect quite a lot of my work will be done in AWS SageMaker.

I am fairly comfortable having my laptop being a conduit to better resources in the cloud. There are also strong security advantages of not having sensitive data on laptops.

Way scarier is a world of native code and appstores

Why is it scary?

All your Data are belong to us?

It's the end of being able purchase any kind of perpetual license to your software. It'll all be on the web and it will be paid per month. When that meets a company with an aggressive sunset policy or if they have an outage it won't be a good time.

It probably requires updating user protection laws to deal with new business models and enforce interoperability.

We are still in the Wild West Phase of SAAS.

We already have a draft of them from timesharing days.

Seems unlikely. Even if that is a trend right now, if there is a need for other paradigms, then there will be people making and using them.

But with opensource software I can run it on any server I want (AWS, Azure, my own). I'm still in control.

I do this for all sorts of applications.

One could also see it as an option that makes contributing to open source so much easier for small edits. There are plenty of times when I am working that I would make a small change or refactoring to a project, but the idea of cloning, setting up an environment, figuring out how they run tests, etc. makes for too much of a barrier to entry.

If someone says "The trend towards smaller cars suggests trucks and SUVs will cease to exist.."

Not going to happen..

With a piece of software I physically own and that has an offline activation mode (tips hat to Jetbrains), I can be reasonably certain that I can keep using it for as long as I can maintain some kind of virtual machine for the host OS. I will not be affected in my usage of the software by any decision the software maker decides to do in the future - think UI overhauls, deprecation of features -, the balance of my bank account or the software maker goes bankrupt or bought out.

If I am skilled enough, I can mod the piece of software to do whatever I want (this especially applies to games), or can swap out pieces with other pieces (e.g. replace the built-in compiler of an IDE with a different one).

A pure SaaS environment? I'm completely at the mercy of the operator now. I am locked in into whatever decision the operator makes, I depend on them keeping their service available 24/7 (because when they go down, I can't work and make money), I depend on them not getting bought out by a competitor that then decides to close up shop (either to get rid of competition, acqui-hire or the specific SaaS service is unprofitable), I'll have to pay whatever price the operator wants (which is particularly insidious given the SV model of price dumping, monopoly formation and subsequent extortion), and in most if not all cases I have no way of modification (userstyles/userscripts just don't work in compiled JS/CSS apps any more without a lot of work). And to top it off, for many SaaS solutions I have to pay money to keep using it under a contract, which is an obligation on my future budget.

Scary was probably not what I meant, more like paradigm shifting change into something unrecognizable from my experience.

I just want to add that running in the browser does not mean running in the cloud or web. I actually once worked on enterprise software that used a browser as GUI. That's not at all bad. Of course there is always room for improvement.

By a reasonable guess your app was distributed as a binary that spun up a local web server and automatically pointed the user's browser to it. That's a perfectly fine approach for some use cases, but for many others, even the server binary isn't needed.

An extremely underappreciated approach for development and distribution is targeting the browser as a sandbox for fully local applications (embodied in static files—or better: as a single file). I see lots of people making apps and throwing them up on GitHub Pages, but rarely do the developers package them up into a form that you can download from the Releases tab from the associated repo and then double click to run. At best, they'll point at the repo with instructions in the README about running npm or yarn.

(Then again, if their build processes would also target the browser's JS engine and standard browser APIs instead of NodeJS and its proprietary ones, then the entire exercise of setting up an NPM-based development environment need not exist, either. Oddly enough, people who think of themselves as JS developers and spend their days writing web apps seem to either really dislike the thought of actually using the browser, or they're so afflicted with tunnel vision that they've missed the obviousness of using the browser runtime in this way.)

Ellen Ullman quotes Whitfield Diffie in her book Life in Code and I think he’s spot on:

> We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.

That doesn’t really explain why it is bad, it just asserts that “dumb terminals” are bad.

Not “everything is done in a browser” but “everything is done in applications running in a browser engine”

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