Slate Speculates on Internet Operating Systems 248
Slate features a discussion of possible internet operating systems, a Google OS foremost among the potential contenders. The author views the fledgling YouOS as a proof-of-concept that an Internet OS is feasible. He dismisses the idea of a Google-built thin client, arguing that Google would rather build a service available from any Internet-capable device. Google's already-fast service would theoretically translate easily to other web-based applications. From the article: Dollar for dollar, network-based computers are faster. Unless you're playing Grand Theft Auto or watching HDTV, your network isn't the slowest part of your setup. It's the consumer-grade Pentium and disk drive on your Dell, and the wimpy home data bus that connects them. Home computers are marketed with slogans like "Ultimate Performance," but the truth is they're engineered to run cool, quiet, and slow compared to commercial servers. The author compares Eric Schmidt's denials of a Google OS to Steve Jobs's denials of a video iPod. However, he notes that potential obstacles to a Google OS adoption include: the desire to own things; the requirement for fast, flawless networks; and, the trust-deficit when putting personal information on web-based applications.
What a load of crud! (Score:5, Insightful)
So the guys at Slate thinks that the combined computing power of Google's umpteen million users is less than the power of their server farm? Unlikely, even for Google's impressive data centers. If its the case that as a general rule commercial servers were more powerful than the sum of their users' machines, we could do away with all those supposedly obsolete distributed computing efforts.
Home PCs are far more powerful than the average user needs. This has been the case for a long, long time. Even Microsoft is having trouble saturating medium end computers that dell sells for the $900US mark. 2.5ghz with 1gb RAM, and you're trying to tell me that my broadband link can deliver application with faster response? I think not. And I like the way they FUDify the "cool n quiet" marketing campaign as well, utterly misdirecting its purpose.
I'm getting really sick of this "software as a service" crud, but at the same time, I'm also getting scared that companies might actually convince the mainsteam to use it. It would spell the end of privacy and anonymity for users and massively increase the power of already too powerful corporations and governments. "Software as a service" is the ultimate spyware. Today we complain that Sony puts rootkits on their CDs, yet there's no real complaint that our entire OS can not only report to base, but runs from there entirely. Forget keyloggers, this thing will record your keys, mouseclicks and input from webcams, scanners and microphones in realtime.
I sincerely hope that the tool that is the personal computer doesn't get taken away from the masses and replaced with drone terminals that could only be used in the way proscribed by our corporate rulers, and observed by their minions in dark rooms.
Oh yea, feel free to call me a tinfoil hat wearing Google hater, because I am.
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:2, Funny)
XP was preemptive (Score:5, Funny)
Despite the fact that they haven't released a new OS in 5 years, they aren't doing too badly in terms of saturating computing power. They preempted the market, so they actually aren't lagging behind as much as you would expect.
Don't worry though, with the impending Vista release all your available system resources will be put to use for many years to come.
Re:They preempted the market? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll try and bypass all the "Linux is not an OS" stuff and move on to the meat of this discussion: Linux is still immature in some areas, particularly printing and wifi support. (Whether it's Linux's fault is not significant to this discussion.) I'd argue that it wasn't until right around now that Linux is really desktop-ready, and even now there are sometimes serious hitches - but just about any Linux distribution will
And games. (Score:2)
Don't forget games (and mp3 players).
Re:They preempted the market? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ugh...I don't like getting into technical details, but you're using the name "Linux" in a way that is _really_ vague. Free Software is probably a better term, or possibly "Open Source" if you're that way inclined. If I called the Microsoft OS "NT" or Mac OS X "XNU" or "Darwin" you'd be similarly confused.
In terms of kernel level stuff - there aren't many changes because the vast majority of work is done. We have
Re:They preempted the market? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:3, Informative)
I don't see why these so called "online OS" projects don't just use existing X infrastructure to create an easy way to access standard X windows applications and run them remotely over SSH.
You can actually get such [cosmopod.com] solutions. [inqub.net]
These are running over FreeNX [berlios.de] which is basically a compressed X connection where the local machine pre-guesses parts of the communication to cut down lag. I've tried them and they work quite nicely over a 512K DSL. In principle dial-up should work ok too, but I haven't tried.
No
Some Good Points, Missing Others (Score:4, Insightful)
1) No need to install, low end user maintenance. This is important for businesses.
2) Access to applications and your own data whether at your own PC, in the library or at the airport across the country, without carrying around a laptop.
3) Increased ability for software to offer interaction with other services.
Re:Some Good Points, Missing Others (Score:2, Interesting)
Look 10 years ahead. Good succeeds with this and we're all using some GoogleOS or YouOS or whatever, delivered from the Microsoft of the day. Do you relaly think they'd not d
Re:Some Good Points, Missing Others (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't have any kind of global (or even national) wireless internet access. This means that a laptop with local data and programs will win out in many many places.
Most people aren't on super-reliable guarenteed 99.999% uptime connections. This means there'd be some times when you just can't get your data, again, a normal computer OS wins out.
What happens when a hacker or virus nukes a GoogleOS server farm? Sure, there might be back-ups somewhere, but how many people's lives will get seriously messed up in the meantime?
Re:Some Good Points, Missing Others (Score:2)
1) Play games. There are tons of games out there that aren't multiplayer, or can be played without internet access.
2) Listen to or create music.
3) Write. Be it for pleasure or work, there's almost always a word processor open on my computer for some reason or another.
4) Code. If I'm writing a program or webpage, I don't usually need net acces
Re:Some Good Points, Missing Others (Score:5, Insightful)
As a home user/hobbyist I wouldn't want to give up my privacy, right to tinker, etc. And I defiantly agree that the Slate article is full of it when they say an online OS backed by servers will deliver better performance then my PC. I have a great internet connection, super fast and reliable; that said I don't think it could beat the performance of my modest 2.4 GHz PC with it's GB of RAM..
Re:Some Good Points, Missing Others (Score:3, Insightful)
But that's really the problem with InternetOS. Mobile computing by way of laptops, palmtops, and even cell phones these days is really going to make everything else irrelevant. People don't need an InternetOS, they've already got very powerful computers with them all the time, or will soon. And while some hardware requirements are getting rather extreme,
Re:Some Good Points, Missing Others (Score:2)
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:2, Insightful)
You use Slashdot, don't you?
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:2)
Before labelling something you don't understand as "idiot" or "stupid", maybe you should consider being a bit more open minded and try to understand why you do not understand.
I tell ya.. my sig proves itself right at least once every day...
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:2)
Why do you want to continue deliberately hating something you have no interest in understanding? You do realize that is not only ignorance, but it is deliberate ignorance.
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:5, Informative)
The boundary between web page, web application, internet application, distributed application, and dedicated heavy apps are blurring very heavily. These Internet OS's may or may not be a wise way to enable a better future for merging all of these into something more cohesize to the end user, but whether or not these Internet OSs will play any roll in our future, does not invalidate that someone is trying to make progress toward our future of computing.
When I first saw Mosaic 1.0 I thought it was stupid and a waste of bandwidth. I said no one would ever want to use the World Wide Web. This was in 1993. Obviously I was way wrong in my assessment for how wasting currently valuable resources would become irrelevant for a greater good in the future. I *could* have been right. But the point is.. what makes sense to us today by our measures today, will not apply tomorrow as these new concepts will enable things we cannot do at all today.
There are lots of examples of distributed and online applications that you use all of the time. But you see them as a web page. Does it really matter where the source code lives, if it is statically compiled or dynamically interpretted, if it is rendered on the server from one form into another (say PHP to HTML) or rendered on your desktop (Flash), or even used with an locally installed heavy application (Goodle Earth, Quicken, online gaming, etc.)? The boundaries are not as simple as Web Page or Software Application anymore. You can fight it.. but the desire to distribute will win in the end. Who knows what it will look like.. I'm sure the fabbled Web 2.0 will play a big role in all of this.
It's economically *inevitable*. (Score:5, Insightful)
How many weavers, potters, carpenters do you know? Well, today's equivalents are programmers, system administrators etc.
Things like VNC just make it easy.
Re:It's economically *inevitable*. (Score:2)
Ghosting an image, with local storage (maybe some network-based backup) would also make manual sysadmin-like work for home users unnecessary. Good OSes shouldn't need any "support services", and I can accept if the OS itself it then instead offered in a pay-per-month manner*. Wh
Re:It's economically *inevitable*. (Score:3, Insightful)
Your processing power won't be taken away, you'll just be able to buy a $30 VNC set top box, which is what 90% of the population will do and will be quite happy with. Hell, no virus worries, no CDs, no license keys, it'll just work. Actually, no, the computer will most likely be free with a $5/month service charge... It'll do most of the stuff your PC will do.
We're getting to nearly 10mbps adsl rates, I don't think it'll be much longer, X and VNC work fine ove
Re:It's economically *inevitable*. (Score:3, Insightful)
No backup, no ownership, no security, no privacy, no upgrading, no DVD player.
Really, when you look at the bulk of what costs money in a cheap desktop system: the monitor, the mobo, HDD, etc, you don't really save that much by putting it on the network. A solid system can be had for under 300 total. Computer-level text is unreadable on anything less than 1080p, the most expensive high-def monitors you can buy, so you'll need a monitor for the for
Re:It's economically *inevitable*. (Score:2)
Once you have a computer that can decode compressed HDTV and play MP3s, you've fulfilled the processor-pow
Re:It's economically *inevitable*. (Score:2)
Re:It's economically *inevitable*. (Score:2)
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Searching through your documents
Even if its a complicated non indexed search as a small amount of users would be searching at any one time you can obt
Thin Clients again FTW! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:2)
Perfectly true, but...
Or even low-end computers that white box companies sell for $300. However, note that Vista will require at least $2K worth of hardware to get "the full experience".
He Must Think We're Retarded (Score:2)
Anyway for a single session big iron is almost never as fast as your desktop machine would be. The big iron is good at certain things, like disk IO. It's good at running a shitload of sessions side by side
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:4, Insightful)
As a home user, they can pry my computer (not a thin-client, actual computer) from my cold dead fingers. I've never seen a web application with the responsiveness or usability of a well-written desktop app. I also am dead set against anybody else having control of my data for the reasons you laid out.
That being said, as an IT Prosfessional things like this are very, very attractive. I work at a relatively small (maybe medium?) sized organization with about 500 or so workstations. Even with that being a comparatively few machines, it's a pain in the ass to keep everything patched-up and all the applications updated. When we roll out a new app, there's 500 machines that need it installed.
For this reason, though I hate using them, I look for web-based applications whenever I can so that we can simplify roll-out and maintenance on our systems. Most recently we've even looked at using a combination of VMWare, Citrix, and some thin-clients to move everyone over to using virtual machines that are hosted within our data center. Yeah the "user experience" sucks, but when the goal is for the users to just get their work done, and for the IT department to keep everything up and running as smoothly as possible, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Of course, the most recent problem that's cropped up is the large number of vendors that want you to "subscribe" to their service where they host everything and your users login over the Internet. This I'm against from the professional standpoint as well. If the users are gonna use a web-based app, it better be hosted in our server room.
Re:What a load of crud! (Score:2)
EyeOS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:EyeOS (Score:2)
Which is a ripoff of the late (Score:2)
Re:EyeOS (Score:2)
What? (Score:5, Interesting)
-Erwos
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:2)
I think by "OS", they mean the window environment, such as x-windows or explorer.exe. You obviously need something to interact with your hardware for connection, display, input, etc. From there, however, you can use any number of applications to control what you see and your access to applications, all of which could be hosted offsite.
Damn Small Linux on a USB key (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's what I imagine... (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:2)
Online office suites are one thing. Once you get into the "online web browser" market, you've lost me.
Re:What? (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:2)
cool & quiet? (Score:4, Insightful)
I want one of those? Where are they?
Re:cool & quiet? (Score:2)
Re:cool & quiet? (Score:2)
Trust Issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trust Issue (Score:2)
Yes, one of the reasons why HoTMaiL is so popular is because it was created by an officially registered trusted company. What is more, it runs completely by itself in a locked vault 7926 miles beneath the Earth's surface.
IMHO visibility is the larger issue (Score:2)
I don't think it's that people don't trust their stuff being on other people's computers so much. Look at what most people are willing to send through email, for example. I think the larger issue is visibility. With all your files on someone else's computer, they are no longer private.
And people's computers are actually more private than the diary books of old. They hold more private info.
I worked for years as a computer tech back when I was in college. One of the things I'd do if I was bored was t
Re:Trust Issue (Score:2)
Probably the only time they'd ever have the opportunity to notice would be if they lost connectivity, and even then, a well-designed system would fallback to a local cache while wating for the online service to come back up, and then reconnect and upload the user's changes.
Lots of people send tons of personal information across untrusted networks without giving it a second thou
Thin clients != good time (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing that I would like in this genre is if Google provided an official file storage service. I have my important stuff backed up on GMail, but the front end is a bit lacking.
RDP != thin clients (Score:3, Informative)
But those aren't really thin clients; they're really remote access sessions to a thick client running over a network.
A real thin-client package does the computing locally, as well as the display. It just uses storage and some heavy features on the back-end.
Re:RDP != thin clients (Score:2)
Re:RDP != thin clients (Score:2)
That was the point that the piece on Slate was trying to make, more or less. Did you RTFA?
Re:RDP != thin clients (Score:2)
Re:Thin clients != good time (Score:2)
What I am trying to say is that audio and video applications are increasingly in demand and this is where thin clients often have issues. I used Citrix on the thin client for Microsoft Office. I now use the RDP (which is a direct connection, sorry for the confusion) to access a confidential database, which helps to prevent a repeat of the VA debacle. I do like the idea of being completely protected in the event of a local computer failure b
Sure.. (Score:5, Insightful)
An internet linked desktop environment has all the advantages of the internet - updates, blogging, social stuff - with the advantages of a more traditional system - you actually have your documents stored locally, you're not subject to some company suddenly suspending your service and deleting your account (WGA is another matter...), and things load up quickly and run fast.
Re:Sure.. (Score:3, Insightful)
So you believe it's easier for a server farm to crash than your personal/work computer?
As an example of a real world scenario with huge server farms and redundancy...
When did Google last present this error message for you?
Re:Sure.. (Score:3, Interesting)
One of my ISP's routers could go down. It's happened before and left us without internet for over a week (small ISP,
Too Many Users! (Score:5, Insightful)
Too Many Users Online
I just experienced a good reason why it won't work
Re:Too Many Users! (Score:2)
Cool, quiet, and slow (Score:4, Funny)
Bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Across my infrastructure, which typically has a gig fibre backbone, and 100mb at the desktop, this isn't a mean feat. Hell, I've got it running across the wireless as well.
But to run this across the internet? Gimmie a break. To support my 450+ machines, I would need a rather serious pipe. Which will have a serious cost attached.
Maybe there is a market for home users doing this, but the scalability is going to kill large scale adoption. And since people use (I generalise here, true) Microsoft at work, are they going to learn a new OS at home? Considering the market penetration of the other free OS', I doubt it.
Apologies for sounding negative, but I don't think we'll see this for a while yet.
This is not an operating system (Score:4, Informative)
An operating system is a software program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. The OS performs basic tasks, such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing the processing of instructions, controlling input and output devices, facilitating networking, and managing files.
This is a bunch of web based applications with a slick interface and some persistant storage.
Re:This is not an operating system (Score:2)
Re:This is not an operating system (Score:3, Interesting)
I assume you read this as "OS running on the Internet", which is, of course, impossible. But I read it as "an operating system for the internet".
So, basicly an unified layer that allows to create applications running "on the Internet", accessed by thin-clients, abstracting the worries about underlying hardware, connection & login from the client, "traditional" OS, and other stuff. To paraphrase wikipedia : A software program that manages the hardware
Foolishness or lies? (Score:2, Insightful)
Beta (Score:2, Funny)
Browser and JavaScript Speed? (Score:2)
Network speed is one variable in the speed of an "Internet OS", another player is the speed of the implementation of the programming language used to develop web applications, currently JavaScript is the option for client-side web apps, and unfortunately it's much slower than other interpreted or compiled languages usually used for desktop apps, fo
The author's abjectly clueless... (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The network pipe has to be well in excess of a gigabit per second to be faster than the hardware.
3) The author has NO clue about what he's really on about.
What do you mean, _my_ network? (Score:5, Informative)
Speak for yourself, mister.
My Verizon DSL 768 Kbps/128Kbps service is a lot slower than my mighty 2.5" 5400 RPM Seagate ST9100823A (sustained transfer rate 38 MB/sec). Approximately fifty times slower "reading" (downloading), 300 times slower "writing" (uploading). No, wait... the DSL speed is in bits, the disk speed is in bytes. Make that 400 times slower "reading" and 2400 times slower "writing."
Re:What do you mean, _my_ network? (Score:2)
Supposedly, storage is on their servers, and it's right that their 15 000 rpm SCSI disks will be faster that your 7 200 rpm ATA one.
What will be transfered however is, on your side, mouse and keyboard events (basically, almost nothing), and on their side, graphic commands, textures,
That is, what's fair is not comparing your disk transfer speed but your AGP/PCIe transfer speed against network speed.
PCIe 16x can achieve 4000 MB/s [interfacebus.com] (100x your hard disk speed)...
Gigabit LAN speed isn't rare... but not on uplink (Score:2)
Well, he did specify a consumer grade Pentium, not P3 or P4. So, I suppose that's referring to some of the original Pentium dells still in service with Windows 95 on a 4.3 GB 4000RPM ATA33 hard drive, which probably has only around a tenth the sustained R/W speed of current setups. Still vastly faster than network speeds.
On the other hand, you're assuming that the data needs to be moved around in local storage. If everything is kept on the One Universal Server, most of the time you "only" need to match t
I'd want the opposite (Score:2)
Networks are great for communication, but communication will come to a halt from time to time which could excacerbate a crisis or cause one. The risk of being without critical information just when you need it most is a considerable risk, but the risk of everyone being without critical information at the same time is an even greater risk.
YouOS Is The Wrong Idea (Score:3, Informative)
The author is wrong. YouOS is not an “Internet operating system”, it the functional equivlent of Windows prior to NT: an environment which runs on your existing platform. The client still does the heavy lifting and it will never be portable enough to run on anything with a “keyboard and a screen.” If Google were to go this route, they would provide VNC-like access to big iron on their end.
load of horse hooey (Score:2)
Erm, what? Sure that could be the "slowest part", relatively speaking, but if you move the functionality of your "wimpy" IDE/SATA bus to the incomparably slower home network connection, then yeah, the network will be the slowest part.
Why do editors publish things like this? (Score:4, Informative)
The only things on my computer slower than my DSL line are the legacy serial and parallel ports. To match the PCI bus I'd need an OC-24.
>Home computers are marketed with slogans like "Ultimate Performance," but the truth is they're engineered to run cool, quiet, and slow compared to commercial servers.
Last I heard, the Googleplex was running on dirt-cheap commodity boxes, with IDE drives even. A GoogleOS probably won't be running on heavy Sun iron.
Re:Why do editors publish things like this? (Score:2, Informative)
lol no gaming or hdtv (Score:2)
Yeah, who does that these days? Grand Theft Whosit? Destroy all home computers!
"A network-based PC could offer more file space"? (Score:2, Insightful)
OK, a couple gigabytes of email storage is probably OK (for now). But I've got maybe 500 GB of other data here... I don't know who would offer to store that for free. And even if they did, it would take me, what, 385 days to upload it at 15 Kbytes/sec?
And I'd still want to back it up in case the company holding my data went out of business. Well, OK, Google will probably still be around in 10 years, but YouOS? Right.
I just don't understand the
Re:"A network-based PC could offer more file space (Score:2)
FWIW, they have been talking about something like this for the past 10 years. I remember seeing WebOS back in the late 90s when PCs and storage were so expensive. It's a neat idea, but I cannot see it happening anytime soon. There's just no business model.
Uhhhhh, ok... (Score:3, Interesting)
Until the big telcos are going to make good on their 6 year old promise of 45+ M/bit sync fiber connection; this idea won't even get off the ground. The thin client idea may be good for some, but not all people. I prefer running server grade hardware, not the consumer grade POS stuff you can buy at Frys. I want my power and files at home, not someone else's server.
Sorry (Score:2, Informative)
There have been many debates between geeks about what an operating system actually is, and obviously people writing about these "Internet" operating systems, and the ones creating them, don't have a clue as to what they truly are.
An operating system isn't just a file manager, its a layer of software that allows you to interface with hardware, manage data, and control devices. By its very definition, an
Re:Sorry (Score:2)
The claims about the local bus bandwidths etc. from the article are a little crazy, but if you squint a little they can be rephrased: the local capacity used by most common apps is lower than the available network bandwidth. Given this assumption it makes a great deal of sense to create an Internet "OS."
I'd guess the #1 problem with an environment like this would be outages. I've used GMail to collaborate on a paper with some coworkers, an
Foreshadowing... (Score:2)
GooOS, the Google Operating System [kottke.org]
The Google Cube & GooOS [fosfor.se]
agitated tirade (Score:4, Insightful)
OS??? (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe I'm getting old... Has the definition of OS changed all of a sudden??? Aren't they rather talking about an Internet-based application suite?
Anyone remember "Network Computers"? (Score:4, Funny)
great, if all you do is simple stuff anyways (Score:2)
Editing home movies? (a single DV tape is what? 60GB?)
Ripping DVDs? (I don't let my daughter play the originals, only burned copies)
Fooling around with GarageBand?
Video chatting with relatives in other states? (might work but why share limited bandwidth with the "OS"?)
There are a lot of other things that people do besides watch HDTV or play Grand Theft Auto that would never w
The Google OS is already live (Score:2)
It's what Google's services use to interface with their giant computing and storage cluster, and the thin client is the web browser.
That's their whole business strategy, selling computing services as a commodity that people pay for indirectly with ad-views. Search is just their most successful application because most people use computers primarily to read documents.
The fact that they tr
Slax Linux? (Score:2, Informative)
Does he have to spell it out for you? (Score:2, Interesting)
Off Mark (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the reason a WebOS (err WebOSses hopefully) will come about is because computing needs have changed. Look at today's teenagers. Most of what they do with a computer is online. If you took their computer, and disconnected it from the internet, it would be practically useless to them.
There are a few exceptions. They still use the computer to transfer pictures from their digital camera to an online service, like Photobucket [photobucket.com] or Flickr [flickr.com]. They still use the computer to transfer music to their iPods. The computer is just an intermediary in these cases, and it's not hard to imagine these things being done without it -- just add WiFi. Then their camera could upload their photos directly to Photobucket, and their iPod could download songs and videos from iTunes and YouTube [youtube.com].
Of course there is the need for office type apps, like word processing and spreadsheets. These things can also be handled online pretty easily. In the future they will be handled online not because it's better, but just because everything else is online. Right now these things listed so far: photo managment, music management, word processing, are small things to most young people. The big things are instant messaging, email, social networking, etc. The big things are online. The small things will follow.
And that's why WebOS will come about. It will not be an OS in the traditional sense [wikipedia.org]. Traditional OSses were about providing the infrastructure for applications to run on a computer. The point of the computer was the applications, but you needed an OS to make the applications possible. Thus the OS had to manage memory allocation, device management, user input/output, etc. The point was still the apps. The apps are online now, and new infrastructure is needed for them. That's where WebOS comes in. That's what WebOS must be. It must provide the infrastructure for applications and allow these applications to interoperate.
Right now if I'm a developer writing a Windows-based application, I don't have to worry about low level machine code for writing bits to disk, but if I'm writing an application for the web, chances are that I have to worry about creating database connections and issuing SQL in some form to read/write data. A WebOS will eliminate the need for this. If I'm writing a Windows app, I don't have to worry about peeking and poking pixels to draw things on the screen. However, if I'm writing a web app, I have to not only know about HTML and JavaScript, but the quirks of how different browsers render different things (CSS box model [wikipedia.org] for example.) A WebOS should eliminate the need for such arcane knowledge.