

Anyone have thoughts on the viability of a firefox os? - brett

It's not a new idea. Why not roll a linux distro that boots directly into firefox and then start hacking ff to add on any missing os functionality and ensure the entire experience is smooth? There are plenty of people that don't use much more than their web browser and with Google Docs that number is only going to grow. <p>Anyone know of someone already working on this?
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mark-t
I have a bit of a conflict of interest on this topic, being a developer for a
window manager, but I also have some rarely expressed opinions because of that
point of view. So, keep that in mind when reading my comments below.

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.

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bls
I think when you say "firefox os" you really mean "browser-based UI for
Linux," right? You are already supposing that Linux (an actual operating
system) exists underneath.

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.

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rms
Yes, this is a great idea. I don't use much more than a web browser, though
Firefox 2.0 really gets bogged down with complex Flash and Javascript. The
rendering engine of Firefox 3.0 is much better in that sense.

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.

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ivankirigin
I'm amazed that people ignore speed as a critical issue when thinking about
web vs desktop apps. I mean, think about why folks evangelize the CLI.

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.

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corentin
There's something called KioskCD (at kioskcd.com). I've never used it but it
looks like what you're looking for.

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euccastro
What do you mean by "any missing os functionality"?

