Quantum Leap Forward: Accelerating the Browser in Hardware

First we had simple web forms. Fill in a form, post the form, the whole screen refreshes.

Then came AJAX. Fill in a form, click a link or button, data is submitted and only the appropriate parts of the screen reload.

So what’s next? It looks like hardware acceleration.

Given how much of a platform the web browser has become, this is a really interesting idea. What I haven’t figured out yet is, given Google’s momentum toward the browser as a complete operating system via Chrome OS, could we be approaching a tipping point in the whole perspective on what an operating system is, what it does, how it interacts with the underlying hardware, etc. This could potentially be a complete re-invention of computing as we know it.

Sun’s old slogan “The Network is the Computer” and the promise of Cloud Computing could be poised to explode into the mainstream of what moms, dads and grandparents, i.e. “the rest of the the World” understand as computing in general.