Wow, it seems to work really well. After giving it a small test drive, I'm impressed. Solid work from Mozilla, and a pretty informative article too!
That said, between this, iodide and ObservableHQ, I guess I give up. The browser is the new OS.
My question now is - how can we make browser environment to be more like Emacs (bear with me)? My main complaints are:
- Browser ergonomy absolutely sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it. You're at the mercy of each service's UI, which usually means you'll be clicking a lot and maybe sometimes get a keyboard shortcut here and there. Forget about advanced features, or consistency between sites.
- You have near-zero control over your computing environment. Between sandboxing and half the code being obfuscated blob of transpiled JS (the other half of the code is on the server), you can maybe automate the UI a little with userscripts and fix it up with userstyles.
- There's near-zero interoperability. Unless service authors agree on and implement some APIs, things can't talk to each other. Forget about making them talk. Whatever little wiring you can sometimes do (thanks to services like Zapier and IFTTT), you never have control over the process, and it always involves communication through third-party servers, even if all you'd like is to transfer some local data between browser tabs.
If the browser is the next OS, can we make it suck less than desktop OSes in terms of ergonomy / productivity? Desktop OSes already suck in this regard compared to the promise of old Smalltalk and Lisp systems (that's why I live in Emacs most of the time), so all I see is a downwards trend.
Current state of things is fine for casual use and casual users, but if I'm to spend 8+ hours a day doing serious work in a web browser, the browser needs to be better.