infundibulum

One time I was talking in one of the Linux IRC channels.

Generally I can only handle doing that for about five minutes because it seems to be an important shared goal to make people feel dumb.

*cries*

But I remember back in the day there was a weird extension to the Konqueror web browser that let you open up a shell in the bottom half of the screen, almost as though it were a web page.

And I thought that was kind of neat, because you could hack on web pages textually and see how they looked, all right in the same application. So I started thinking about, for instance, Javascript and bookmarklets and how the address bar was almost becoming a command line of sorts.

So I meekly suggested to the Linux geniuses that some day maybe the browser and the shell would merge. And in fact, the more I think about it. the more I’m convinced that this will be the case. In fact, I’ll just say how I really feel: I suspect that the distinction (as far as most users are concerned) between the operating system and the browser will just go away.

But all I said to the people in this channel was that I thought it would eventually be possible to run a shell from the browser. And they went BERZERK. They actually said stuff like “I will spend my life working to prevent it.” And I was like buh?

Well anyway, leave it to the ever-avant-garde _why to bring us one step closer: try ruby! (in your browser)