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The Browser Is the Operating System

browser goodies in Firefox It occurred to me a couple days ago, that the bottom right corner of my browser is starting to look a lot like the task bar of my windows machine.

Then it occurred to me that the browser is the operating system. Pretty much everything I do is in the browser. I could switch from Unix to Mac to Winderrs and it really wouldn't slow me down that much. If it hasn't moved to the browser, it's probably trying to right now (Photoshop/editing). The only things I can think of that really would have a hard time being in the browser might be audio and video work. But hell, if bandwidth makes some great leap and transferring 4 gigs of data becomes lightning fast, who knows?

I've been kinda keeping tabs on Bespin, a web IDE for sites. The idea's cool, and offers some huge advantages for shared code scenarios. I also hear that the newer versions of Firefox will have some Ubiquity goodies built into the address bar. The address bar already made huge leaps when FF3 came out with Awesome Bar, but sprinkling in some Ubiquity's gonna turn it into a command-line interface. URLs are interfaces too, and the address bar's only gonna get stronger.

There you have it. In 10 years, nobody's gonna notice what OS you use. It'll all be on the web, and you'll use some portable dumb terminal to access it.