(2013-08-25) Browser Future

Doing some pondering about where the Web Browser may be headed.

My bias is to keep it as thin/narrow as possible, so that it's fast and stable and simple.

But thinking the other direction might make sense, too...

Old: 2008-08-21-MozillaFutureBrowser

Also: 2012-07-10-KayInterview

Hmm, Cyber Dog/OpenDoc?

• 2009: Google Wave as social-enabled OpenDoc

Does browser support of JavaScript and SVG make it a Universal Canvas?

• does D3Js make it easier? Or the newer/richer Javascript Client Framework-s? (Note that Google is a big force behind Angular JS.)
• cf WebRTC for Real Time functions

Once you have a PlugIn system, is the browser much different than an Operating System with apps? An Internet Operating System?

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_%28computing%29#Compared_to_extensions (browser extension)
• NPAPI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI
• http://colonelpanic.net/2009/03/building-a-firefox-plugin-part-one/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/how-to/getting-started

SmallTalk-like browser? Potential Full Stack Web Framework?

• Lively Kernel
• 2012-04-07-JonesAlternativeSmalltalkVision
• Zachary. Voase: "The Web is Becoming SmallTalk" - So if we’re moving into a world of treating the browser as a VM, the manager of a long-lived application state, we need the other parts of the Smalltalk model: live-editing and persistence.
  • cf (2007-01-20) Yegge Great Software Systems
  • discussion
  • Sean McDirmid post on Live Coding/REPL. A bunch of visual languages afterwards support liveness without really calling it such; Tanimoto (91) coins the term liveness to describe what they are already basically doing. Maloney and Smith re-coin the term liveness a few years later (95), independently of Tanimoto, to describe basically the same property in Self's Morphic. Burnett elaborates on Tanimoto's liveness in a nice VPL paper (98). In the mean time, REPLs and fix-and-continue environments abound in the Lisp and Smalltalk communities, but these are hardly live in the sense used here (though they also focus on early feedback).
• Amber Smalltalk is an implementation of the Smalltalk-80 language that runs on the JavaScript runtime of a web browser. It is designed to enable client-side development using the SmallTalk programming language.