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Discussion on: The Rise of the Web App

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Graham Trott

I think I made it as a throwaway comment, but now I look again and yes, it's certainly a possibility. After all, do we really care what the operating system is or what it's doing as long as it delivers the goods?

Actually you can do a lot of work in 10ms, even in JavaScript. The latency of the OS is a lot more of an issue, whether the app is browser based or a non-web application. Recordings have to go somewhere, data is written in large blocks and most systems are only designed for human perception of latency.

Moving the OS into the 'browser' (which can't really be called that in such a scenario) blurs the line between OS and App so I wouldn't rule out functionally real-time performance being possible. How far forward am I permitted to look?

The concept of a "computer" may itself be only temporary. Some Facebook users think they don't use the Internet; in their minds they've bought a single-purpose appliance. This effective reductio ad absurdum leads to various different types of single-purpose machine, each being a different build of a common platform. Who knows?