Operating System in Web Browser

Today, i tried out YouOS. It is some kind of an operating system running in your browser. You have (almost) all the main apps like a web browser, chat client, notes, shell and so on. There are currently about 250 official applications available, which can be installed in your own environment. It is even possible to code your own application. (Most of the 250 apps are user contributions.)
An interesting feature is, that your are automatically logged in to a chat application after logon, with which you are able to chat with other users currently running YouOS.

It works really great, but was unfortunately a little bit slow at the time i tried it. One might ask “Why would I ever need such a thing?”.

I think it could be pretty useful, if you are switching computers very often during the day. (desktop and laptop at home, workstation at the office, computers in internet cafés, etc) Most of the time I am running clients for mail, news and instant messaging all the time. With such an Browser-OS it would be possible to have all those applications running remotely and you are able to login from everywhere and use them almost like they are running locally.

Unfortunately this is currently not possible with YouOS, because you cannot logout without terminating all running applications. Hopefully this feature will be integrated eventually.

Another (wicked? ;-) ) idea would be to extend xorg’s xserver with an browser-capable client. If this would be possible, one could use a complete Linux system (for example) in a webbrowser. I would like (and use) that. :-)

BTW…here is a screenshot of YouOS with some applications running:


Leave a Reply





Archives

del.icio.us links