10 Web Operating Systems Reviewed

Stan Schroeder writes "Waiting for GoogleOS? Why not try some of the WebOS applications that are already available? Believe it or not, there's already over 15 of them, and here you can find a review of the 10 most promising WebOSes. Most of them might not make you want to ditch your desktop OS just yet, but some are very good and can be used on a day-to-day basis. Highlights include DesktopTwo, Goowy, YouOS, EyeOS and Glide. You can find the whole bunch here." Note: for the purposes of this article, "WebOS" is defined as "a set of applications running in a web browser that together mimic, replace or largely supplement a desktop OS environment."

Isn't this a step backwards?

[cunamara]

Back in the day, one of the arguments for the "personal computer revolution" was to free computer users from central control. The idea was for the user to own their own basically self-sufficient computer, rather than sharing that stuff. But as time has gone on the the Internet has become ubiquitous, computer users are voluntarily being re-centralized with things like GMail, IMAP, web-based applications, etc. Are we voluntarily surrendering the freedom of personal computer ownership?

Re:what use?

[partenon]

The main use is that it's a new area to explore.

Funny to read that. Some time ago, we had "dumb terminals" (in a literal translation from portuguese to english). Applications fully running on a central computer via network isn't a new idea. The "new" factor here is the internet. How cyclical our market is...

By the way, if you wonder about having a box that only boots and get everything from network, you'd be surprised to discover BootP (bootstrap protocol) and others, used for diskless workstations.

Re:Uh, what the fuck?

[H3g3m0n]

There are also browsers in some of them :) This actually does make sense, things like bookmarks and history can be kept online without requiring any bookmark synchronizers or needing to be accessed from a special bookmarks site, other than the initial webOS connection, also you could enable access to the bookmarks through such a portal site and enable synchronizers to get the best of everything. With that said, I think that webOSes them selfs are kind of pointless. It would be much better to have a web based NX client (like the one VNC has) and just virtualize an entire trimmed down operating system. Although possible it might be useful to be able to click on files in the webos filebrowser and have them downloaded locally, although I'm sure with some basic java script hooks on the browser side and some modification to the file manager being virtualized it could be done.