Anyone know of someone already working on this?
This is an idea I've heard before. I agree that everything in the world is going to the web. File systems will become distributed. Every application you use will come from the internet, with the exception of your kernel and the software needed to retrieve the applications. They'll probably run remotely, too, and just send you the graphics/UI.
However, I think that turning the web browser into a window manager is going in the wrong direction. It completely disobeys the Unix philosophy of writing programs that do one thing well. Firefox's role in the future should be rendering and running remote applications. Organizing the apps using tabs, MDI, windows, workspaces, viewports, etc. should be left to the people who are spending all of their time thinking about how to organize applications.
Isn't Internet Explorer + Windows Explorer + Web Folders pretty much doing this already? Windows' Web Folders feature lets you store documents remotely and access them over HTTP from regular (non-web-enabled) applications. Internet Explorer lets you browse the local filesystem and the web from the same browser window pretty seamlessly.
It seems that Firefox is indeed becoming an application deployment platform. However, it doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Instead of having one package manager in the operating system, there will be two: one system package manage and one Firefox package manager. There are all kinds of security and manageability problems with that. Already, there are many buggy Firefox plugins that cripple the browser, effectively causing a DOS attack with crashes and decreased performance. This is a good indication that we should not have confidence in Firefox's abilities to manage third party applications. Really Firefox should be in that business at all, since resource allocation and crash prevention are fundamentally operating system features.
The right solution is to improve the installation experience provided by the operating system, and have it provide security-oriented integration capabilities for applications (as opposed to to the performance-oriented integration capabilities we have now). This would require the operating system to provide a sandboxed environment by default to downloaded applications. The OS needs to provide a middle ground between the almost unrestricted access given to today's downloaded applications, and the totally restricted access given to web apps; that access needs to be very close to the web app side.
With this kind of severely-limited sandbox, we can then eliminate the whole UI of application installation. Instead of installation, we would just have caching. Instead of a list of programs in "Add/Remove Programs," we would just have a "Free up XXX MB of disk space" page.
I've thought about this in great detail. The essential point is that a pure Firefox GUI allows someone uncomfortable with a normal computer to accomplish amazing tasks. Limiting the user interface allows them to accomplish more and there's almost nothing that can't be done from Firefox anyways. It's an idea YC likes, my team got an interview with this idea to get rejected for our lack of a prototype.
For now, I'm working on my biotech startup but once that's bringing in revenue I'm planning on coming back to this.
Email me, I'd love to talk about this more.
I'm fine with persistent information across platforms/computers through server synch. I'm not sure you even need a browser for that for most applications, but it is a convenient platform.
But it can't be all web.