The recent release of Google Chrome has caused a bit of a stir in the blogsphere. Plenty of post are appearing arguing for and against the latest kid on the browser block. There plenty of pros and cons to Google’s new baby and it’s certainly making for some interesting discussions between the various sides. One thing that Chrome does seem to have brought to the for once more is talk of the Web OS and Cloud Computing. People are pondering whether or not the value of a traditional OS can out shone by the Web based OS.
The Web OS is not a new phenomenon, there have been a few around for quite a while such as Desktoptwo and Eyeos are two of the commonly known ones. Web based OSs come with applications installed and some file storage. The big advantage, no matter where you are or what computer you are on you always have the same desktop and applications (a little like active directory on a grand scale)
The big advantage of this? Familiarity, no matter where you are you have access to the apps and information you need all from one handy interface just like a traditional OS. Obvisouly you don’t need a wrapper around these web based apps. There are plenty of option out there like Google Docs, Zoho Docs and Preezo don’t have a Web OS wrapper. This is whats known as Cloud Computing. using the web as a service to provide applications with the data stored on a central server accessable from anywhere. With the advent of Web 2.0 we are no longer satisfied with a static web page that we cant interact with.
With web based apps you can ignore products like Microsoft Office in favour of there web based applications. Working on a PC/Server with no office suit, simply log into Google Apps and open it up in the spreadsheet application just itching to be useful. There’s one obvious downside to this approach to computing, what happens when the PC has no internet connection for some reason, maybe your a laptop user who is out of the office, suddenly you have no web based office product to use and no access to your files stored on the central server. This is something Google have tried to solve with Chrome and the integration of Gears into it. Gears creates a local copy of your online document and provides Ajax with the ability to run locally on your PC so that when you have no internet it is still possible to run your web apps and see the documents you are editing. Chrome allows you to split applications off from your main web browser, run them in stripped down windows making them look more like Desktop Apps, it also has the added bonus of meaning your application doesn’t shut down when your web browser is crahsed by a site as its seen as a seperate instance.
Web apps are useful, I like being able to access and edit my data from anywhere. Solutions like Sugar CRM and Google Docs allow groups of people to work together on projects and jobs when they can not be in the same building. We brought Google Calendar in at our office for the simple reason that it allowed our engineers to acces it from anywhere in the world and see what we had booked in for them from the office.
They are not with out down sides though. Web based apps are lacking in features. The needs of most computer users haven’t changed much since personal computers came along, they want word processing, spreadsheets, communications, and games. Users now adays are used to the features of programs like Microsoft Office, but at the moment web apps just arent capable of this. Take Google Doc, normally people use Word, but Google Docs looks more like Notepad than Word. This feature lose means they are not really viable as a complete replacement for their desktop counterparts as yet.
In a similar way a Web OS cant really replace a traditional OS for feature lose, the most obvious one being how do does your PC boot with out an installed Operating System. Web OS’s are reliant on a browser to run them, almost like a runtime for something like Ruby or Python, and browsers need an OS between them the hardware. So a Web OS is really dependent upon a traditional OS to be able to run. Kind of makes it hard for it to replace one doesn’t.
The real question is can web app replace desktop apps? The answer that one is, yes I think eventually Web Apps will be able to compete effectively with Desktop Apps, given time more features and usablity will be added to them and with inovations like Chrome and Gears they can only go from strength to strength
September 29th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
[...] computing is something I have talked about before when I talked about the concept of a Web OS. Currently Cloud Computing is the media buzz term, its [...]