Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm...
by giancarlostoro on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @05:29PM
(#24126189)
I would be fine if not everything is in the browser honestly. However the number of packages should be a slim amount to mimic how minimalist Chromebooks can be closely.
Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm...
by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @12:52AM
(#24128697)
Putting everything in the browser doesn't buy you anything unless your goal is to put everything into your web services. Meanwhile it incurs a lot of costs because browsers are designed for client-server, which in Google's case was the point, but in a user-focused device it's a liability. You saddle yourself with javascript instead of better languages, you end up having to reimplement things like local storage and data transfer between applications, a lot of interesting applications will need access to lower level networking than browsers normally provide (e.g. ICMP, UDP, multicast) or some other access to hardware (e.g. access to USB devices).
Why build a second operating system inside the browser instead of just using the original operating system?
The thing about that it is that it has really very little to do with Mozilla. ChromeOS is only that because a) ChromeOS and Chrome are both made by Google (there is no "teaming up"), and b) Google's incentive is for everything to be using their services in their browser.
But putting everything in the browser is not generally desirable in its own right. An interesting competitor would have a browser, but it would just be another application. And there have been several attempts at making security-first operating systems, from various Linux distros to OpenBSD, but none of them have Google's resources. And that isn't really a problem Mozilla can solve at this point either.