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After reading this article about Web Operating Systems I couldn’t help but making my view on the subject public: the only Web OS there will ever be already exists - its the browser.

The concept of an operating system, stolen from the desktop world, does not belong on the Internet. The major advantage of the WWW is that it’s a distributed platform - each application chooses its own implementation, the libraries and web services it uses in the backend. The Wikipedia definition of a Web OS is ridiculous – a set of abstractions, such as a file-system, for networked applications. Except the only abstraction in a distributed system is the protocol. Web services like Amazon’s S3 file-system already provide such functionality. Why would we make web applications dependant on a standard set of libraries and APIs of a Web OS when the Internet provides us with the freedom of choice? In fact, specifications like BPEL already allow us to define business processes that dynamically determine which web services to use during execution.

So if web applications don’t need the services provided by a Web OS, what does a Web OS actually do? Perhaps it’s a convenient container that allows us to run multiple web applications side by side? Indeed so, however isn’t that the purpose of the browser? Why have another container, another layer of abstraction? How efficient would such a container be? Assuming its written in Javascript and HTML, not very. Why not simply improve the browser – after all it already is the default runtime platform for any web application.

Of course a standard set of libraries, like GUI libraries, are great. They standardize the user experience across applications. And we already have them. However the trick is, as in the real world, in mass adoption, not constraints of an OS.

We already have the basic components of a Web OS: the distributed web applications functioning like services and their runtime environment – the browser. What may be lacking is a central view of our data across all these distributed applications. I believe that this is what will come to be known as ‘the homepage’. And it’s not far fetched: RSS can already make much of that happen. What’s needed is browser support for such features and a few basic specs.

To conclude, browsers are the operating systems of the Web. They should provide sophisticated client-side APIs for ajax web applications to make use of: desktop notifications, desktop integration through drag-and-drop, client-side data cache, secure access to the file-system, and so on. Why browsers remain dinosaurs is beyond me.