Windows 8: Microsoft's browser-based OS | ExtremeTech - 1 views
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Microsoft’s browser-based operating systemGet this: The entire Metro interface — the complete Windows 8 front-end — is powered by Internet Explorer 10. Not the browser with a back button and an address bar, but the IE10 rendering engine Trident. To drive this point home, Metro-style apps in Windows 8 can be written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and they will be just as “low-level” as their C++ and C# cousins. In other words, Windows 8 runs web apps natively.
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To put this into contrast, think about the current state-of-the-art in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 9. Chrome has glorified extensions and bookmarks, Firefox is working on an Open Web App Store, and IE9 has pinned sites. Windows 8 will have web apps that are first-class citizens, capable of using all of the same hardware resources as any other compiled program — and it will all be powered by Internet Explorer 10.
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It’s the great Web App Dream: write once, run anywhere.
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Excellent review of Windows 8, including some prescient thinking about what it means to have HTML+ Web Apps running natively on the Win8 OS platform. The author/reviewer Sebastion Anthony suggest why this breakthrough is a problem for Google, Apple and Mozilla. I'm wondering though; is this a problem for the Open Web future? Or is this a positive step towards an Open Web communications and collaborative computation platform that is used by all and owned by none? After nearly thirty years of a love-hate-hate more than ever relationship with Microsoft, for sure Win8 and native HTML+ is something to carefully watch.