The Birth of a New Software Category - The Internet OS

The Nostalgic Old Days

Press the start button...

My Pentium III case rumbles to life...

Windows logo emerges and the loading bar... Waiting...

And here it is, the iconic green field, blue sky, and little fluffy clouds...

Opening Winamp - "6. The Cranberries - Zombie" plays.

Yahoo Messenger blinks, Skype chimes.

Opera is downloading a movie.

Might play GTA all day...

By evening, movie is ready... Snacks, GOM player, and the drumroll of 20th Century Studios...

This was a random summer day about 17 years ago: tunes on Winamp, movies on GOM, documents in Word, designs in Photoshop, games from CDs, and browsing with Opera to stock up on offline entertainment.

Web Evolution: From Surfing to Working

At that time, the internet was still a new thing. It was good for surfing, but not good enough for working. As time passed, it became more mature, faster, and more accessible. The place became attractive for creators. You could build an app and make it instantly accessible to millions of people, without any app store censorship, through the browser. With a single codebase, you could access the global market overnight.

On the other hand, for people like me, it was so much more efficient than the offline world. I didn't need to download anything; I could listen to any music as if I had the world's playlist locally on my machine. I could stream movies directly in the browser, and I didn't need to manage documents on the hard drive anymore.

And so, descendants of all my local applications decided that the internet was a better place to live, and they started migrating from the OS to the browser. Winamp migrated as Spotify, GOM player as Netflix, Skype as Slack, Word and Excel as Google Docs, Photoshop as Figma, and so on.

‍

The Struggle of Modern Browsers

My browser, living in peace and harmony, got unwanted guests. These permanent apps took a substantial part of the tab real estate, and they were not going anywhere. They were constantly consuming a portion of the tab space. Together with temporary browsing tabs, they created a big mess in the browser window, which had never been created for such a purpose.

The browser was always good at navigating chaos. Its tabbed design allowed users to quickly open and close dozens of websites during the day. It was the best for surfing the web, but not the best for working with tools.

On the other hand, the OS represented an organized place where information was processed and crafted into a final creation. It was best for permanent apps, the ones that were needed many times throughout the day.

Soon after, permanent apps realized that the browser's tab space was not the best place to live, and they had to find a better place. By their nature, they belonged to the Operating System. So, they slowly started leaving the browser space.

‍

The Rise of Electron

That's when the era of Electron began.

Electron, a JavaScript framework, offered web apps the chance to live in the OS land. It essentially transformed a regular web app into a desktop app, allowing them to be easily accessible directly from the OS dock and to have their own window without chaotic tabs.

These desktop apps improved accessibility and usability. I no longer needed to open the browser and find the "Slack Tab" every time I needed to message my colleague. I could organize my permanent apps at the OS level, freeing up space in the browser window.

However, there were some downsides as well. They consumed more machine memory, they still needed to be downloaded and installed, they didn't have access to some of the benefits of the internet, such as extensions, password managers, shared sessions, etc. It wasn't possible to spin up two instances of the same app like you would open two tabs of the same app, and not all apps offered a desktop version due to its associated maintenance costs.

So, we ended up with Operating Systems trying to manage web apps and browsers attempting to handle permanent apps. We imposed such responsibilities on both that they had never been designed for.

‍

The Intersection of Browsers and Operating Systems

Digital life became a mess.

It's not the same as it was 17 years ago when browsers and Operating Systems had very clear roles and co-existed together in harmony.

Is this the optimal setup for our digital life?

Or do we need some kind of solution?

Do we need a new browser?

Or maybe we need a new operating system?

These questions, the discomfort of a digital mess, the assertions that "browsers have become new operating systems," all sound like the beginning of something new. Something that's different from both, yet similar and familiar.

It sounds like the birth of a new software category that takes the best parts from both worlds and creates something unique. Something that will be designed from scratch to handle our modern digital living needs.

I don't know whether it will be called "The Internet OS," "Web OS," "SuperBrowsers," or maybe "SmartBrowsers." but one thing is for sure, it will be something that we have not seen before - it will be a new category in the software industry.