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10 Web Operating Systems Reviewed
Stan Schroeder writes "Waiting for GoogleOS? Why not try some of the WebOS applications that are already available? Believe it or not, there's already over 15 of them, and here you can find a review of the 10 most promising WebOSes. Most of them might not make you want to ditch your desktop OS just yet, but some are very good and can be used on a day-to-day basis. Highlights include DesktopTwo, Goowy, YouOS, EyeOS and Glide. You can find the whole bunch here." Note: for the purposes of this article, "WebOS" is defined as "a set of applications running in a web browser that together mimic, replace or largely supplement a desktop OS environment."
It's a desktop environment or, at the very least, an application suite. Not an operating system. Until some website is handling process and memory management, it's no OS.
But I guess "Online Desktop Environment" doesn't quite sound as cool does it?
I can see one reason for a Web OS, and that's that it makes it easy to access your desktop from anywhere. However, from a technological point of view, the web browser has to be pretty much the worst choice of interface - the only compelling reason for using it is that it's ubiquitous.
Browsers were never meant to do this sort of thing - AJAX is a hack that's hard to get working 100% reliably across all browsers at the best of times - just look at the hoops one has to jump through to get the back-button working properly, not to mention handling the differences between Firefox and IE. Why on earth would you want to base an entire desktop on such a shaky foundation?
(Bearing in mind that 74% of all statistics are made up on the spot...) I suspect that 99% of internet users access the internet from the same machine (or at most 2 machines) 99% of the time. The cost in increased bandwidth, sluggish response, lack of high-bandwidth media support seems to me a heavy price to pay for portability. Even if we do decide that it's worthwhile, there are technologically better ways to do it.