I thought that analysis was ridiculous the first time I read it. I read Chrome's design docs when they were released. Chrome's design is approaching that of an operating system. Considering that it has to manage processes, there is no alternative.

But that's the thing, it's only managing processes, not scheduling them nor managing the minutia of their stacks — it devolves that responsibility to the real kernel by using 'dumb' native processes instead of inventing its own fucked coroutines with a browser-wide GIL for all the logically-independent javascript environments.

It is less OS-like than any other major browser!

Correct, it is not an operating system. Just as the Java Virtual Machine is not an operating system. But when you start using principles and common designs from operating systems, you are approaching the design of an operating system.

this is a bit newer http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os

I'm actually waiting to buy a Netbook until it comes out, in the vain hope that someone will ship a decent ARM-based system using it.

But it is just slightly-extended Chrome running directly in X unparented without the standard Gnome Desktop BS on otherwise stock Ubuntu.

tmux+vim+chrome is all i really need. (and a full posix system down below, of course)

What I want is NaCL implementations of urxvt+SSH and VNC/RDP.

I don't need yet another local posix system to maintain, I want remote access to my real server where my main screen session lives, and I want that access to live in a tab.

you can get vnc over html5, thought it may not be as fast as you'd like.