

A modest proposal: the Continuous Client - brandonkm
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/26/a-modest-proposal-the-continuous-client/

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thristian
It sounds like an ambitious idea, but Mozilla has had their "Firefox Sync"
product (née Weave) available as a developer release for some time now:

<https://mozillalabs.com/sync/>

Basically, it synchronises your saved passwords, browsing history, and open
tabs between different machines with Sync installed. If you use Firefox Mobile
(née Fennec), you can open a tab from your desktop machine on your mobile
device, and vice-versa. Mozilla have even announced an iPhone client that
(presumably) launches Safari instead of Firefox, but still gives you access to
your open tabs and history:

[http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/26/firefox-home-
coming-...](http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/26/firefox-home-coming-soon-
to-the-iphone/)

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robotkad
Sun kind of did this in 1999 with the Sun Ray
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray>)

 _This enables another notable feature of the Sun Ray, portable sessions: a
user can go from one Sun Ray to another and continue their work without
closing any programs. With a smartcard, all the user has to do is slip in the
card, enter their password when prompted, and they will be presented with
their session._

~~~
mseebach
Not just "kind of". They had a bunch of Sun Rays at my University, and this
worked great. Just pull out your card, and plug it in somewhere else, and it'd
be like your session had just gone on screensaver.

Of course, obvious flaw in the model: If you need mobility, you have a laptop.
If you don't, well, the feature isn't really that useful. Also, the Solaris 9
user experience leaves something to be desired, but that's not the Sun Rays
fault. (I compiled almost everything from source in my homedir.)

Really cool thing: It is (was?) possible to configure a multi-monitor setup
with several Rays, purely over the network.

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regularfry
A Firefox plugin to save-state-to-Dropbox (or something) would address a lot
of this. Would that I had the addon-fu to attempt it...

~~~
_sh
Indeed. As would 'sync tabs', in the same vein as Chrome's 'sync bookmarks'.

~~~
aerique
The Xmarks plugin has the option to sync tabs, although I haven't used it
myself.

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Groxx
I see this as problematic. Throw in different screen sizes, different input
methods, and different operating systems, and what do you get? Maddening chaos
for application developers, meaning it wouldn't be supported.

Can you imagine the support tickets? "Outlook doesn't look right on my cell
phone." "I can't swipe in iBooks on my Eee." It's the ultimate epitome of the
problem with Android's fracturing across devices (which is, thankfully, not
too bad).

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extension
This exists already, in a few different forms.

The obvious ones are VNC and GNU Screen, but the fundamental problem with
these is that the client is too dumb and can't adapt to different form
factors. The client needs to talk to the server in much higher level, more
abstract terms.

This is where REST comes in. If you can sync URIs between devices, then _RE_
presentations of application _S_ tates can be _T_ ransferred to and from each
device, and you _should_ be able to seamlessly move sessions around, in
theory.

In practice, not all web apps are properly RESTful and so won't work this way,
though the landscape is certainly improving in this regard.

Also, not all apps are web apps, nor should they be. But a URI doesn't have to
be a web page. I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Android provides
some sort of facility for native applications to intercept and handle
arbitrary URIs. This could be used, for example, by a native Twitter client to
show the equivalent native interface for a URI on the Twitter site.

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pmccool
Given the title, I expected satire. I can't see it. Am I missing something?

~~~
unwind
Possibly the author (who I haven't researched and didn't recognize) failed to
realize the connotations of the "A modest proposal" meme.

The easiest way to implement this "vision" would be to host your session on a
cloud-based server, and then use VNC from whatever machine you're at to
connect to it.

It would require some tweaking of typical accessing machine's operating
systems and so on, to drop you straight into a login dialog for a VNC client,
and would of course assume that bandwidth isn't expensive, but it would be
very simple.

Since your (default, at least) VNC server address would be constant for you,
it could of course be trivially remembered by the various client machines, so
all you do is log in and there you are.

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silentOpen
Is he being satirical? I think it sounds like a good idea.

I think you'll see it come together from two separate places.

1\. Standardization of browser event subscription by a remote host. This might
happen via an HTML5+ ecmascript API in which scripts register user event
callbacks. Think ACPI through JS. This requires aware applications but Google
could make it a de facto standard.

2\. In-browser identity management and single sign-on. This is necessary to
achieve the seamless re-authentication to services. This may be in the form of
a browser plugin that, like regularfry says, saves to cloud storage. I think
we'll see browsers grow web-aware state APIs in the next 5 years as local and
remote get blurrier and blurrier.

What do you think?

~~~
wcarss
It could be argued that the browser itself is ripe to undergo a rather radical
change over the next few years. Google's strategy here is to fatten the
browser so that it becomes the Operating System, and then offer web-aware apps
through that environment. Another strategy would be to thin the browser down
and integrate it more strongly into the OS.

Browsers should be managing this kind of continuous (or as I like to say,
persistent) state for us. They should also be capable of a lot of the social
interaction some companies have chased after - sharing certain information
with friends, syncing things up (simple app idea: sync up youtube across
multiple browsers so you can fill your house with music simply by having a net
connection), and likely other things as well.

I would suggest that people work toward building these browsers of the future,
but such an undertaking would be monumental, and as you noted, Google has a
pretty strong lock on this corner of the tech world.

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wcarss
My friends and I began working on building a service which provides this
functionality not long ago -- we planned to offer an application service
available through the web browser, but after Google announced the Chrome Web
Store, we may pivot to build applications suited toward that arena. There's a
lot of ways to use this, and we can't wait to show them to the world.

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Steve0
Well, I connect to my workstation on my laptop with remote desktop.

This way I can use my netbook on the road and still have the quadcore gpu,
multiple vm's and the open tabs in firefox.

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ggruschow
screen -R

~~~
goodside
The fact that this is still sometimes the most practical solution is amazing
to me. I was trying to get an IRC client for my Droid so I could talk to my
friends during a road trip I was on, but the connectivity was poor enough that
any local client would leave gaps in the channel logs whenever I was out of
service. After searching a bit for something that would hold my message buffer
server-side, I ended up just SSHing into my VPS and running irssi through
screen.

~~~
ggruschow
Most of the productive stuff we do with computers is still all about text. Our
computers are replacing our TVs though.

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Charuru
Literary unsavviness aside, this is definitely the future of computing, maybe
not in 2 years but not far after... All that's needed is good execution.

