Skip to main content
Is the future the web OS?

With more capable and feature complete browsers, it becomes easy to develop newer things that were never imagined before. To the extent of building an operating system using Flash or AJAX.

Quite a few have cropped up recently. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_desktop for a list of in-development WebOSes.

So, what do I get out of a web OS?

Location independence, information is stored in a central location can can be accessed over the web from anywhere.

This is very much down the drain if you own a portable device or computer as you have all the info you need. But, there are instances where you may not be allowed to carry your portables, where as you might have access to the Internet where you can quickly pull out
the information you need.

This could be an advantage as well as a dis-advantage, the latter being, a single point of failure render non-availability / loss / leakage of your documents. But, some OSes do allow you to save your data locally as well.

Platform independence, indifference to the browsers host. It does not matter anymore if you are running Linux or Windows or the OSX. You are also freed from the nuances specific to the operating systems.

Swing did this for Java, but comes with a huge baggage (not much according to current standards) of installing the run-time on all machines to run your application.

The downside is, you have to learn to use a new OS that implements the most common features of all operating systems and introduce a few quirks or features that is unique.

Desktop persistence, where your desktop looks the same irrespective of the machine you access them from. It is the same from where you left off...

Some OSes even come out with an SDK to let the community develop new applications.

So what do web OSes in general lack:

Performance - or lack thereof. Most of implemented on top of scripting languages and are suited for business applications. Do not expect to see full fledged image editors or 3D games out of these.

Security - Some one else is managing your data. A slip would end up in loosing some or all of your data.

Reliance on connectivity - Downtime would deny access to your data.

Application range - The other day, I was looking for an application that draws the sky-chart based on your locale. Can you find such an application for a WebOS? Most of the application are
stripped down to the bare essentials as it would prove too costly to download each app over the net every time.

So, if you are looking for performance, security, alternative applications and would probably be disconnected from the net, then the WebOS is not for you. On the other hand, if you are on the move, do not have a portable device or restrict to the less esoteric features of an application, it may come in handy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_operating_system provides a brief overview of what a Web OS is.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Inside a Text Editor Ever since my college days, after dabbling with vi and a few other editors, I always had an yearning to create my own. Now, I am still stuck with XEmacs and jEdit and had a chance to compile / study the sources and documentation of EMACS and a free editor component called Scintilla. Until now, I was under the the belief that text editors used a doubly linked list to represent the text in memory. The advantages of this approach being insertions and deletions are much more easier which is just a matter of just un-linking a node off the list. But the shortcomming is that they tend to fragment memory with each node or line take a bit of memory. The other alternative approach is to have a dynamic array which is a contiguous space of memory and can sometimes be directly written off to a file. The disadvantages are that insertion and deletion are costly and you need to reallocate quite frequently. While goint throug the source and documentation of text editors, I chanced ...
1 comment
Read more
Battle of Wesnoth Been on the lookout for a free turn based strategy game and chanced upon the Battle of Wesnoth . Despite it being an open source game (meaning, you get the source), it was incredibly polished akin to any of the other turn based strategy game (Alpha Centauri), be it the background score or the graphics or the tutorials. The game itself is set in a period similar to the D&D or nethack era. For the film buffs, if you have read or seen the Lord of the Rings, you would probably be able to relate to the clans that populate the game world. The game play, as with any turn based strategy game requires background information on each of the units that you own, their strengths and weaknesses and a lot of planning (a kin to chess, but with a lot more parameters) where factors like day - night cycles are taken into account (e.g, humans fight well during the day, but the orcs are better during the night). It is encouraged to keep your older units as they gain experience and beco...
1 comment
Read more

The Age of the Hybrid?

Honda recently offered a slash in their new Civic Hybrid model. Though not all are sure if it was a publicity move or an inventory clearing sale, I believe with good mileage figures and a growing concern on how green everyone should be, hybrid cars will see an increase in prominence in the Indian roads. The Indian market is price sensitive. Be it an industrialist who is buying a Rolls Royce or a car enthusiast pining for a BMW, the inevitable question remains: "What is the mileage?". This has led to a slew of Diesel cars in the market . Though economic to us, it still fails against the 'green' parameter. The other competitor to hybrids are the all-electric vehicles which may be termed greener (assuming that the cost of production, battery is far less harmful than the actual emissions), they lack in range, ability to quickly recharge (which seems to be a 5 minute affair for it's counterparts) and the lack of accessible recharge locations (do you think at the curren...
Post a Comment
Read more