Comments on: The Browser Desktop, developer tools

By: Alain

Alain — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:31:16 +0000

I have to agree. I’m also actually currently working technically from Windows, but with a Linux VM. Between the amount of time I spend in a browser, Cygwin-powered X forwarding and VMWare’s Unity features, I barely notice the OS save that the UI is generally more streamlined when I come up from a linux command line.

By: verisimilidude

verisimilidude — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:36:31 +0000

Most of your desired digital eco-system can be provided on Windows by Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.org). Cygwin also has an implementation of X-Windows which gives you your connection to a headless machine accessed by network protocols. And X is much more fluid and functional than running things through a browser. It just seems like a lot of people are re-inventing everything just to say it runs through the browser.

By: Nick Fitzgerald

Nick Fitzgerald — Fri, 07 May 2010 05:48:32 +0000

Also, I had forgot about this, but someone ported vi to javascript: http://gpl.internetconnection.net/vi/

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:23:41 +0000

Why do we need better tools? I need a respectable editor and a functional terminal; Bespin is close for an editor (and maybe was hard to implement, but so be it), and rxvt-js or some other tool have pretty much done the terminal. Building more stuff is interesting, but I don’t see why it should stop us from making the leap, nor does it seem like a big regression in terms of current UI. And I find the long-term maintainability of HTML UIs to be easier than traditional GUI UIs (but then I would, since I don’t do GUI work). Also in cases like these you can ignore some browser backward compatibility. There’s no need to support IE 6 for instance.

By: desmaj

desmaj — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:09:46 +0000

The orbited project [0] is a server-side proxy that exposes the socket API to javascript in the browser (disclaimer: I’m the current maintainer). It’s been around for a couple of years now so it’s pretty stable and we’re working on making it easier to use. The js.io [1] project is working on javascript implementations of standard protocols that can be used both server-side and in the browser. If we’re willing to say that the right idea is to make network programming in the browser look like it does on the OS, I think this is a good start.

Not too long ago, someone put together a nice proof-of-concept [2] that connected a local browser client to the local Akonadi PIM storage service. In doing so, they hit me in the mind. It’s seems strange to think about a desktop environment implemented entirely in the browser, but it does seem possible. I’m just not sure it’s a good idea.

With regard to the Linux VM, I’m currently maintaining my development machine as a virtual machine, and I’m pretty happy with it. A nice side-effect seems to be that I can more easily separate “user” me from “developer” me. They have very different needs. Developing in a VM has had a stabilizing effect on the rest of my computing environment since I’m much less likely to hose my host OS install while doing strange developer things.

[0] http://orbited.org/
[1] http://js.io/
[2] http://steveire.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/akonadi-goes-web2-0/

By: Jérôme

Jérôme — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:26:01 +0000

Working in a browser, or simply in Windows for that matter, is mostly an ergonomic issue for me. I miss the window management love from X11 WM, I miss the real command line / terminal and I always need to set up a myriad of things before it works like-it-should (even vim is msim’ified in an horrid way). A bit orthogonal, but interesting approach anyway : http://qubes-os.org/ This project tries to produce an integrated security-by-isolation Xen-VM based distribution, featuring a different VM for any different “class” of activity : web browsing, work, finance, name it.

By: Asbjørn Andersen

Asbjørn Andersen — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:06:37 +0000

This is in essence my situation as well; chromium, gedit and a shell… Making a web based text-editor with a shell seems like an interesting way of minimizing a “web/remote OS” to something approachable. It’s really all I need, and would leave me with … just a browser :).

This is actually what bespin could en up becoming. What I would like to see is their “terminal” being an interface to a OS level shell with all the richness of tools and control we are used to, and not just some bespin specific thing which is what it seems to be now ( I could be wrong – been a while since I had a look ).

Another important thing to me is the ability to save application states. Typically I’m in gedit with a bunch of files open relevant to a bug on a current project. It would be nice to save that application state and bring it back whenever and wherever I feel like and keep on working. This could be solved by saving browser states ( different file in different tab sort of thing and bringing that back up ), but I’d rather see 1 tab being 1 remote OS – or at least 1 editor with multiple files. Seems cleaner.

A second note would be the ability to work offline. But this can largely be solved with the storage facility being built into browsers these days.

The statement that it’s hard making web applications with rich interfaces I think i fault. With javascript libraries such as jQuery, processingjs and also taking into account the new possibilities with html5, making rich user-interfaces for the web is relatively simple compared to other approaches ( IMHO ).

Interesting stuff, drop me a line if you start up something and would like a hand :)

//Asbjørn

By: Ali

Ali — Wed, 05 May 2010 07:19:35 +0000

There are two separate issues here: the Linux VM, and the browser-based interface. Both seem reasonable, but it strikes me that a better-than-browser-based interface is possible to be written.

By: Dalius

Dalius — Wed, 05 May 2010 06:56:29 +0000

Zope2 was trying to move all development to browser. They have failed. I’m not Zope expert so I might be wrong :) What you are offering is slightly different and because of that your idea might succeed. Terminal is good idea: I can still use version control, I can still use my tools (code indexing tools). Editor is problem however. I can still use my editor (Vim) in terminal but that will be slow if used over network and in that case there is no point to use browser: I can use putty from Windows. If we use browser native editor there is no guarantee that editor will satisfy everyone and each editor has its own learning curve and becomes favorite tool for developer (vim, emacs and textmate are only some examples). Again editor in JS will need to be different. E.g. I have mentioned code indexing tools (ctags, gnu id utils or my own pig (http://bitbucket.org/Dalius/pig/wiki/Home)) – there should be way to integrate with those tools. Editor must be extensible in this case.

TL;DR: If I can connect to server using SSH I don’t need dev. env. in browser.

By: Sumeet Agarwal

Sumeet Agarwal — Wed, 05 May 2010 03:00:14 +0000

I’ve thought about this a lot too, and even more lately when I wish I could do more with iPad.

I keep wussing out of doing anything about this because it’s still so hard to make web applications with rich interfaces. I think we need some better tools before we really start seeing nice solutions to this problem. And I think we might have to wait a while for the browsers and standards to mature more before good tools are even possible.