You can fork the project on Github and Mercurial and write DOM bindings to whate...

anon1385 · on June 20, 2014

Having to convince users to install your fork of the OS really isn't the same thing as being able to run a different native browser alongside their existing software. If the only way to use a browser other than Internet Explorer had been to switch OS then Firefox could never have been created in the first place.

ndesaulniers · on June 20, 2014

How is that any different than with native code? You can't just rip out your OS' implementation of libc and have all of your programs use another (not all implementations of libc are ABI compatible).

You can't boot your computer into two operating systems at once (or can you?). This whole post is analogous to running Windows in a VM on Linux.

anon1385 · on June 21, 2014

>How is that any different than with native code?

On an open platform I have a choice of web browsers. On a Javascript sandbox based browser-OS I don't have any choice.

>You can't just rip out your OS' implementation of libc and have all of your programs use another (not all implementations of libc are ABI compatible).

I'm not talking about using a different browser engine to run local apps. Obviously there are going to be platform specific APIs that mean things won't be compatible (unless of course Google and Mozilla agree on a set of APIs and don't implement any vendor specific ones at all, but that is highly unlikely since it would mean killing backwards compatibility with current ChromeOS and FirefoxOS apps).

I'm talking about being able to use a different browser stack to browse the web. FirefoxOS makes it impossible to do (with any kind of respectable performance) but it's trivial on a native open platform.

>You can't boot your computer into two operating systems at once (or can you?). This whole post is analogous to running Windows in a VM on Linux.

This is just a silly semantic argument. You are defining the web browser stack as part of the OS just to avoid the awkward reality which is that you have totally locked out all other browsers from your platform. It doesn't make sense to run two kernels (unless you are doing things with a VM) because the role of the kernel is to talk to the hardware. That isn't the role of the browser stack, so there is no reason at all to only allow a single browser stack to run at a time. It's quite possible to run several, which is of course trivially demonstrable on an open platform like GNU/Linux or Windows. If you really want to make analogies, it is more like running a second windowing system. Some OSs like linux make it possible to swap your window manager, others like OS X don't. But the most important thing is that on either you can always just run native software full screen and draw whatever windows you want with no performance penalty (which in this analogy is akin to being able to just browse websites using a third party browser stack, but not being able to run the local apps using it).