Had a quick look at Mercury OS, to me it looks like a mock-up, not an implementation.
For me the term "OS" refers something along the lines of Linux, BSD, Minix, Haiku-OS, Minix, Plan9, etc. For each of these a large amount of effort has been, and continues to be, expended on optimizing for CPU architecture, device drivers, window managers, etc.
If you are more interested in operating environments and experimenting with presentation and manipulation concepts, then as you have hinted, using the web browser environment as a virtual machine is a far more productive approach to trying out different concepts without massive amounts of very low level programming.
I rather like the look of Self and Smalltalk environments. Have toyed with some similar concepts running in a browser in full-screen and/or kiosk modes.
Ah that’s a great point! Yes, I was really talking about the presentation aspect only. And indeed how to get to experiment with it in the cheapest way.
I now realize the term I was looking for was “desktop environment”. Somehow it completely skipped my mind.
For me the term "OS" refers something along the lines of Linux, BSD, Minix, Haiku-OS, Minix, Plan9, etc. For each of these a large amount of effort has been, and continues to be, expended on optimizing for CPU architecture, device drivers, window managers, etc.
If you are more interested in operating environments and experimenting with presentation and manipulation concepts, then as you have hinted, using the web browser environment as a virtual machine is a far more productive approach to trying out different concepts without massive amounts of very low level programming.
I rather like the look of Self and Smalltalk environments. Have toyed with some similar concepts running in a browser in full-screen and/or kiosk modes.