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Page 1: Os in-a-browser

OS-IN-A-BROWSERFARRUKH NAEEM [email protected] SCIENCES Student at COMSATS UNIVERSITY

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INTRODUCTION

Browsers have evolved far beyond their original mission of providing one-way windows into the world wide webosphere. Indeed, as more services migrate to the cloud, browsers only reinforce their new role as multi-function boxes of digital magic thy have started to behave more like the operating systems.

All the important Internet things are available in browser form—everything from communication tools to productivity suits to disposable escapist environment. It's almost like the browser has become an OS in and of itself. In fact, you could say that's exactly where things are headed.

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INTRODUCTION

As websites have come to look more and more like applications rather than static pages, they've begun to bump up against the limits of what today's web browsers can do. Developers have responded by using a variety of proprietary plug-ins and workarounds to expand the browser's functionality. One example of this is local storage. There aren't a lot of good options for applications that want to store significant amounts of data client-side in a way that will continue to be available if the Internet connection goes away. Google has Google Gears, while Adobe has Flash. Each offers local storage, but neither is compatible with the other, nor are their APIs likely to be adopted by other browser vendors in the future.

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HISTORY

The war for the first browser begun when the IE browser was launched by windows and ultimately become the winner by defeating the pre existing world’s only and best NETSCAPE’s web browser.

Netscape communications formerly known as (Netscape communications corporation) found in 1994, is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape navigator, its web browser. Netscape's web browser was once dominant in terms of usage share, but lost most of that share to IE during the first browser war. The usage share of Netscape had fallen from over 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent by the end of 2006.

Netscape is credited with developing the secure sockets layer protocol (SSL) for securing online communication, which is still widely used, as well as JavaScript, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages.

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HISTORY

Netscape stock traded from 1995 until 1999 when it was acquired by AOL in a pooling-of-interests transaction ultimately worth US$10 billion. Shortly before its acquisition by AOL, Netscape released the source code for its browser and created the Mozilla Organization to coordinate future development of its product. The Mozilla Organization rewrote the entire browser's source code based on the Gecko rendering engine, all future Netscape releases were based on this rewritten code. The Gecko engine would later be used to power the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser.

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HISTORY

Marc Andreessen (the co founder of Netscape communications) is credited with many bold and visionary ideas such as "Everyone Will Have the Web" (ca.

1992), "Web Businesses Will Live in the Cloud" (1999), "Everything Will Be Social" (2004, four years before joining Facebook's Board), and "Software Will Eat the World" (2009).

But not all of Andreessen's predictions are as ringing and relevant. His 1995 proclamation that "The Browser Will Be the Operating System" still reverberates around the web, despite the elusiveness of the concept.

The idea is that we can rid our computing devices of their bulky, buggy operating systems by running apps in the Cloud and presenting the results in a Web browser. The heavy lifting is performed by muscular servers while our lightweight devices do nothing more than host simple input/output operations. As a result, our devices will become more agile and reliable, they'll be less expensive to buy and maintain, and we'll never again have to update their software.

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Basic difference between OS and Browser

Operating system It has the ability of managing the running

programs intelligently Operating system provides the basic interface

for data storage. The OS developers call it the files syst.

The operating system dos not require external APIs for the software components to interact with ach other.

The operating system is intelligent enough to equally distribute the cup usage to a specific program so that on bad program can not disturb the functionality of the whole system

Browser The browser were meant for the sake of just

information getting, forms fillings and viewing static web pages or images.

But now as more web applications are being built the usability and functionality of the web browsers is increasing dramatically.

In our daily life now we spend most of our time on our browser rather than on desktop.

This is actually the belated fulfillment of Netscape’s concept of Browser as the new OS.

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Reasons why the browser is the next OS

1: The rise of vast, rich Web applications 2: Easy extensibility via plug-ins 3: Its open source foundation 4: Metaprogramming 5: Multiplatform simplicity and mutability 6: A clean abstraction layer 7: Better sharing models for libraries 8: Fertile, competitive marketplace 9: SVG, canvas, vector graphics, great user interfaces 10: Node.js

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What’s the future ?

The browser vendors are in continuous efforts to make the difference fill between OS and the Browser. The Firefox browser has already introduced the APIs in its browsers which is actually there since the Firefox version 2.0. the new version of Firefox (Mozilla Firefox 3.0) is another step forward toward a better browser with advanced APIs and built in plugins.

Now the point is that the browser do not have any consistent interface for data storage like the OS have, the browser vendors are in continuous efforts of making that happen and they call it the local data storage system rather than the files system called by the OS developers but the concept is same.

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Technical aspects

HTML is in efforts to make the web browser's vendors introduce the local storage options in the browsers this the part of recent HTML5 efforts.

Now the point is that what about when the users go offline and has no internet access. GOOGLE has Google Gears while adobe has flash these plugins/ softwares provide us the ability to preform while offline.

The Google Gear plugin is available for all the browser as a plugin including Microsoft’s IE but as Google is Microsoft’s biggest rival, Microsoft have to think out of the box to b a part of the next generation computing.


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