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Comment by syx | Hacker News Reader

I recently wrote a blog post [1] about the comeback in popularity of these web desktops, especially after seeing a lot of these being posted on HN recently. OS.js was one of the early projects I started tracking years ago, and it's really well designed and documented. The interface always reminded me of those mid 2000's distros with GNOME 2, which is a nice thing since most nostalgic web desktops tend to have Windows 9x themes.

[1] https://system31.simone.computer/blog/desktops-zip

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EyeOS was doing this around the turn of the millenium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS

The initial release of OS.js was around 2015, over a decade later.

I used to play around with and use this, but I could never find a good use for it. It felt really counter productive to open up a desktop within my desktop when it was a laptop, so I had it anywhere already

But can I open a browser in desktop within the browser on my desktop?

Exactly my problem too, what's the main use case for a desktop in browser?

At least for me, with the one I am making, I consider one possible use to be that my app has support for many file types without a user needing to have those apps installed on their OS. Also running files on my app is like a sandbox.

Ultimately though you could do that using separate websites, IMO there isn't a need for a desktop for that use case.

I wonder what are the fundamental features of desktop? Drag and drop, copy & paste, multiple windows being open thereby keeping track of multiple user states, better organisation of the underlying file structure, interaction centered on cursor and menus, keyboard usage focused on content input not command input, and allowing various inpedendent applications from interacting together via a unified view, unified file structure and unified visual shortcuts.

I think that a OS in the Browser would be great if it would allow websites to visually interact with one another, just as desktop OS's allow various applications to interact visually - via drag&drop for example. Then it would make sense for me to use an OS in the Browser.

What's the use of a desktop. I never see mine. Window at full screen always hide it. The taskbar is where it's at or hotkeys

The taskbar is typically managed as part of the desktop environment. This term doesn’t refer only to the folder represented as empty space behind the windows.

With EyeOS, you certainly could. It would just open an iframe, however.

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