Online desktop
I wonder if you could build a Linux distro where the only program installed was Firefox? You make it look like an ordinary desktop, with “Word Processor”, “Email Client”, “Web Browser”, etc, but the word processor is Writely and the email client is Gmail, both of which come up in their own chromeless window so they seem like a separate application, and the web browser is a stock Firefox window. You might not even need X for this. Obviously it’d be about as much use as a chocolate teapot without access to the net. File storage is online, and each “web app” you use has been hacked (with GreaseMonkey or similar) to save to your online repository; you get a “file manager” which is probably some Ajax thing to manipulate the files on the remote server and to open them in an appropriate application (where the URL of the remote file gets sent to the local host, which then opens one of its “applications” like Writely and passes it the URL of the file to open).
Not sure how useful it’d be, but it’d be pretty small, and it’d genuinely prove that the web really can be your apps. What’s missing from this picture? Assuming you’re prepared to live with Flash (which I personally am not until Gnash comes along) then multimedia isn’t really a problem. There’s no web-based equivalent of, say, Jokosher, but there wasn’t a web-based equivalent of MS Word either until fairly recently either. Your apps probably wouldn’t be as good as desktop apps, because we’re in an early stage of development of web applications, but that’s only a matter of time, and maybe it’s outweighed by the convenience of having your fully working desktop on a 16MB USB stick. (Look at how many people use webmail, despite its UI being worse than desktop mail apps; even if you think that new webmail clients like GMail or Yahoo Mail are as good, people still used Hotmail in their droves before the whole Web 2.0 thing.)
One more project I probably don’t have time to build…
I could definitely see this being taken on by companies that are looking for a low cost alternative to terminal services.
Of course, with anything on the web, security would be a concern. Spyware that could read all your personal files would certainly be a PITA.
I wonder how long it is until we get a completely web based office suite.
7 hours later
blueNine: the spyware point doesn’t apply. Spyware is software running on your machine, so it’s running as you, so it can read all your files right now. There is, potentially, a concern that your documents can be read by other people, but that’s not because it’s an “online desktop”, that’s because it’s “files stored on a publically accessible server”. It’s a problem with online storage, not with online editing; spyware doesn’t have anything to do with it.
21 hours later
The main concern I have with this is that there’s so much that can go wrong. For example, to type some kind of document I would not only need my PC to be working, but also my internet connection and the various online services (the word processor, file server, etc.).
Too many possible failure points for my liking.
2 days later
Adam: I understand and agree with all that in theory. However…when I don’t have a net connection, my computer’s like a paperweight and I don’t know what to do with it. And I think that ubiquitous wireless free internet is coming. I really do.
2 days later
Your idea is well on its way thanks to Michael Robertson. He has ventures developing various ajax apps: http://www.ajaxlaunch.com/. Of course, ajaxOS is based on Lindows. As for multimedia, eyespot is quite ambitious.
7 days later
Why Firefox? All you really need is emacs. . . .
8 days later
think you still need x there…
2 weeks later
I hacked up a prototype and made a screencast - http://blogs.gnome.org/view/nigeltao/2006/10/02/0
2 weeks later
Surely you’ll have also seen this from Planet Gnome, but in case you miss it somehow (like losing it in mass amounts of RSS traffic or something), Luis Villa linked to http://blogs.gnome.org/view/nigeltao/2006/10/02/0 today, which is a mockup of just this concept.
2 weeks later
And the next day, I realize how stupid I am to have posted that after the previous post. *sheepish*
2 weeks later
aq, this is exactly what i was trying to do for the intended kiosk machines at LRL06. I had the ISO working, but the customisation for the system I was using was a bitch, so I couldn’t hard code the proxy and home page stuff I needed. I may yet get it working :)
4 weeks later
http://www.symphonyos.org
4 weeks later
Jeff: I’m well aware of and have hacked on SymphonyOS. It’s not quite the same thing, although it is interesting in its own right.
Neuro: that’d be cool :)
4 weeks later
If anyone decides to look into this, a good starting point is xulrunner. It’s basically the mozilla Gecko engine and not much else. Firefox is built on top of it. If you want Firefox without the chrome, you are asking for xulrunner.
I mentioned WebDAV in a comment on the “online repository” post, and I’ll mention it again. Since WebDAV can be accessed directly as a normal website (depending on the WebDAV server, of course; I just had to explicitly enable directory listings on Apache2), GreaseMonkey (or equivalent) can be used to make that web interaction look and behave more like a file manager.
The whole thing is entirely feasible if (and only if) the external applications in question can be convinced to save to a WebDAV share. If those applications store in standard file formats (e.g. the OASIS word processing file format, which is supported by OpenOffice.org and KOffice), it can solve the problem of dealing with things offline as well. Imagine using .Mac (already WebDAV, I believe) as your file store, and having your Mac desktop automatically synchronize with it; when online use Writely and when offline use NeoOffice. There is a lot of value to being able to work disconnected.
The idea of using the local machine as a cache, rather than the primary system, is nothing new. The Andrew File System from CMU was doing it a decade or two ago. At UMD in the early 90s the public lab machines had little more than the ability to retrieve a Kerberos key based on your login and connect to AFS. It was AFS that made both the applications and your home directory available. Deploying new versions of software occurred on the centralized server, data transfer between the client machines and servers was minimized, and everything worked quite nicely. My cellphone (T-Mobile Sidekick) behaves in much the same way, with my applications and data being cached on the phone, but everything (with the exception of any pictures or MP3s I store on its mini-SD card) primarily resides on the server with which it syncs regularly over the air. Losing or breaking my phone results in no data loss (excepting the mini-SD card), and once I have a new phone associated with the phone number I can pick up where I left off.
This is getting really long, but I think what I’m getting at here is two things:
1) none of this is new or hard, and essentially all of the pieces already exist
2) the biggest obstacles have to do with interoperability (e.g. use WebDAV, use standard file formats), as they always do
5 weeks later
This system has been established for years… SurfJet
65 weeks later