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I've downloaded quite a few hobby OS's recently and began thinking of an easy-to-develop for OS (besides a Java OS). What do you think about a webbrowser-based OS? I'm not talking about an OS that you load in IE or FireFox... I'm talking about a solid browser based kernal!

Boot up computer to full screen browser (without any buttons). All popular programming languages would be supported.

Apps would actually be web pages stored locally. Desktop would be stored in a file desktop.html. What do you think?

I wish I knew ASM!

It's been done

Cool, do you have a name or link?

Before writing a kernel, you need to know how to spell it. And so for the question: How would the web pages actually do something? Like save a file to disk?

Trond wrote:Before writing a kernel, you need to know how to spell it.

LOL

Trond wrote:Before writing a kernel, you need to know how to spell it. And so for the question: How would the web pages actually do something? Like save a file to disk?

Serverbased OS: filemanagement on server, client just controls I/O. That would be cool, but slow. No usable harddisks on the user-computer (Or just so much that the networking and I/O part can be stored in there).

DarkDragon wrote:

Trond wrote:Before writing a kernel, you need to know how to spell it. And so for the question: How would the web pages actually do something? Like save a file to disk?

Serverbased OS: filemanagement on server, client just controls I/O. That would be cool, but slow. No usable harddisks on the user-computer (Or just so much that the networking and I/O part can be stored in there).

And how is the server save things if it's based on a browser? Ah, so it's not really based on a browser after all, right?

Obviously the browser couldn't be the only part of the OS. Sorry that I misspelled The Colonel (Sanders). j/k. I should have clarified a bit. BUT DarkDragon elaborated a bit.

Trond, like 99.999% of people out there, I have no clue what all goes into an OS.

Trond wrote:

DarkDragon wrote:

Trond wrote:Before writing a kernel, you need to know how to spell it. And so for the question: How would the web pages actually do something? Like save a file to disk?

Serverbased OS: filemanagement on server, client just controls I/O. That would be cool, but slow. No usable harddisks on the user-computer (Or just so much that the networking and I/O part can be stored in there).

And how is the server save things if it's based on a browser? Ah, so it's not really based on a browser after all, right?

Sure, the server can run something different . But that doesn't matter, because that's the easy part. The hardest part is the operating system on the client, because you need a program that can handle all WLAN cards, all Network adapters, all ... and the program has to interpret some code coming from the server and ... . The server can have a already known OS (Linux, Windows or even Mac OS). It just needs to run a server application receiving and sending the data from the clients.

Btw.: It's not the same idea of the original topic author because he want's the OS to be HTML, JS, VBS, Java, Flash, ... capable.

mrjiles wrote:Trond, like 99.999% of people out there, I have no clue what all goes into an OS.

Sounds like a good place to start then

I strongly suspect that in a programing forum the % of people who have no clue about an OS is quite a bit lower

Since a browser is just an interface, maybe should just set your windows shell to be your browser and give your idea a go

The Windows shell has IE deeply embedded within, so you don't need a custom one: set desktop to webpage.

Anyways, this was not meant to be a deep topic. Just a thought. And I'm not saying that the OS has to be written in a web language. The OS can be written in anything. The UI is web based with all programs presented through the browser with PHP/Java/etc. backends with a mini-server of some sort. Take a common browser-OS that are out on the Internet now (that can be used with any OS/browser) and write a foundation.

pdwyer, I meant it as writing their own. If this was true then there would be millions of OS's out there.

But what use is it?

I am making a kernel. Currently it doesn't do much (it has exactly 1 thread, which it "switches" between). The thread can print stuff to the screen:

Trond wrote:But what use is it?

I am making a kernel. Currently it doesn't do much (it has exactly 1 thread, which it "switches" between). The thread can print stuff to the screen:

Bradan OS!

http://www.bradan.eu/files/bradanos.png


.. how will you do networking?

.. how will you do networking?

No idea, I need to get processes working first, as the network driver needs to run in one.

I would go for a custom made linux kernel with all the necessary drivers and only a web browser installed...

Then use google office online!