Are Browsers Going to be Next OS? - II

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. It was said long ago by Mahatma Gandhi.

When you coin some idea and any of the above mentioned three things happen to you, it means you are progressing. It means you have a great idea which can change the way people will think in future. The same thing happened to me. I got mixed feedback on my last blog "Are Browsers Going to be Next OS?". The feedback I got was positive as well as negative. Some people said yes I was totally correct with my idea with slight modifications here and there. But some people told that it is not at all possible even in a distant future, which inspired me to write this blog. How can browsers do the scheduling, memory management and other stuff which operating systems (OS) are supposed to do, they said? How can the research, efforts put into development of OS from last 40 years go in vain? Microsoft will come with more powerful, feature-rich operating system, which will put end to similar kind of theories as mine. Google is good but Microsoft are in the market since long. They will definitely come with something more powerful, effective and user friendly (But who needs that?).

My response is yes, the research put into the development of OS is not going to go in vain. But the area of research is surely is going to changed. Now it's browsers and the application run on it, will get more attention rather than OS. For obvious reasons, OS will continue there job for time to come. But they will be limited to there current situations. I do not expect much development happening in OS domain. Recent launch (not very recent though) Windows-Vista was a failure. Who wants the application which needs 4GB of memory to work. People are looking more towards internet and the browsers which can support the applications on internet.There is a clear paradigm shift for time to come.

Frankly speaking, right now I cannot think of any application which can not be used inside the browsers. To me everything can be done in browsers that too free of cost. Thanks to open-source and Google of' course. Please let me know of such application you can think of by giving comments.

Recently I watch the Google Wave video. One of the application it shows that a person can see live what another person in writing as a text while chatting. Person does not need to wait for another person to write full text and then press enter in order to see the text. I believe (don't you think too that) the next step of this application will be desktop sharing within browser. So who need desktop sharing software installed in our system. This is just one example. There is a long-list you will see pretty soon.

Till then enjoy the great Windows OS with great GUI and curse comes with it whenever it crashes. Have a great day!!!!

Are Browsers Going to be Next OS?

Highly optimistic approach. Isn't? But if you'll try to think more about how Google is going, then with little effort you can easily make it out that later or sooner it is bound to replace all the desktop application. The journey started by launching desktop search couple of years ago. The future is that Google will enable web-browsers to replace OS (Operating Systems). It is still a distant dream but definitely one day we'll not install OS in our systems. At least, OS of heavy sizes, vulnerable to attacks, ready to crash by Microsoft will not be required. We might need a OS size of only a couple of hundred of MBs, which can run web-browsers. Rest of the work will be done by we-browsers and Google's other facilities.

Let's go one step further. There, we will not need to buy a hard disk because Google will provide may be a 1000 GB space. One more step and we will not be needed to install software in our system anymore. Let's take some examples. Google-docs can replace Microsoft office. To watch movies or listen music we do not need to install media players. Anti-virus for PCs will go away because nothing will be there in our local systems. All the data will be stored in Google storage where already the best people in the industry is trying to save the data from any attack. Online photoshop will grow rich with the features they'll provide. We already started playing games online. They are small, but with the kind of development happening these days in internet, do you really think that it will be hard to play games like Quake, AOE etc on internet. In fact AOE has provided infrastructure to play AOE online.

In the current era of changes at fast pace no one can really predict what's going to happen 10 years down the line. But surely as mobile and computers are merging day by day OS and web-browser can be merged and created as a single entity. The new era of Internet was already started long ago by Netscape but Google will take it to the new horizon and Microsoft with the policy of monopolies will die soon.

Please let me know as a comment what you think of the issue.