Re:Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler
by ajkjk on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @03:59PM
(#16171770)
The end state ends up looking a lot like (the user-facing side of) an operating system, except that:
* the filesystem is cloud storage (Drive/Dropbox/what have you -- the Unhosted (https://unhosted.org/) architecture)
* the apps are insecure but open-source by requirement (interpreted jS)
* ... running in a controlled sandbox (the browser)
* ... using a standard UI language (HTML/CSS)
* with functionality modifiable/overridable by user preference (extensions)
It's pretty much the ecosystem you would want if you were building this from scratch! Except you'd want Html/CSS/JS to be much more intelligently designed from the start (I'm waiting so eagerly for the day that browsers natively run more scripting languages than just JS...)
It never could be done in the 90s because everything ran too slowly, but it's feasible now.
* the filesystem is cloud storage (Drive/Dropbox/what have you -- the Unhosted (https://unhosted.org/) architecture)
* the apps are insecure but open-source by requirement (interpreted jS)
* ... running in a controlled sandbox (the browser)
* ... using a standard UI language (HTML/CSS)
* with functionality modifiable/overridable by user preference (extensions)
It's pretty much the ecosystem you would want if you were building this from scratch! Except you'd want Html/CSS/JS to be much more intelligently designed from the start (I'm waiting so eagerly for the day that browsers natively run more scripting languages than just JS...)
It never could be done in the 90s because everything ran too slowly, but it's feasible now.