WebOS, The Offline Internet?
Over at his blog, Jason Kottke has an interesting write up about the direction Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple could be headed, and he flags one significant hurdle.
“Actually, the biggest potential problems with all this are the massive security concerns (a Web browser that has access to data on your local hard drive?!!!??) and managing user expectations (desktop/web app hybrids will likely be very confusing for a lot of users). Significant worries to be sure, but I believe the advantages will motivate the folks developing the platform and the applications to work through these concerns.”
This caused a thought I had a few weeks ago to come crawling out from the back of my mind.
At Olson + Co. we were in the process of moving the shared hosted accounts that we provided for clients over to a virtual server platform, in this case Virtuozzo. As I stepped through the very simple process I wondered out load if anyone had thought of doing the same thing for browser instances. Essentially any application running within the browser would live in a temporary sandbox and if the site did evil things, they would be gone as soon as the instance was closed. The problem is, sandboxes prevent the user from interacting with the local system, which is the premise of the entire Kottke article. However, if the “local server” were built into the software that “virtualizes” your browser instances you could lock down local access to read-only. If there were a file that you needed to get into your sandbox, you could effectively “upload” it into the sandbox using nothing more sophisticated than a file type input field.
As far as I can tell an application like Virtuozzo or Xen does not use much in the way of system resources, so it’s feasible for me to think the application could operate with dozens or even hundreds of browser instances open, but I’m a little concerned about the time it would take to create the instances.
When setting up a server in Virtuozzo, after stepping through a configuration process, the system takes a moment to launch the new instance. While this is only a few minutes, it would severely limit the practicality of creating instances on the fly. Then again, these tools are not designed for the application I have in mind either, so it’s possible they could be optimized to the point where the “launch” would take milliseconds, instead of minutes.
While I certainly don’t know anything, Microsoft has made a few accusations in the last year that could lay some of the groundwork for such an application being built around Internet Explorer in the future.