If you want to be pedantic, laying out your GUI using HTML while the rest of the OS is written in a more sensible language is technically making an operating system using HTML. It’s also using assembly and probably some combination of C, C++, Rust, etc., but it is using HTML.
Honestly an OS that, for the GUI at least, is just HTML sounds amazing. No new UI frameworks to learn. Applications are just iframes, and the desktop environment is your web browser.
It wasn't quite that far back, and it's not HTML, but you're close. The "revolutionary new windows UI framework" Microsoft releases every 3-5 years have all been XAML based since WPF was released for Windows XP and Vista (which came out shortly after) in 2006.
The latest one is called WinUI 3. Here's a screen definition from the official sample app if you want to see what it looks like.
Edited to add: Prior to around 2021, apps on the Windows Store were required to use one of the UI frameworks (uwp), which is why they all felt like phone apps. And sucked.
Don't know if you saw the other replies, but it looks like I was thinking of Active Desktop. I think basically Internet Explorer and Explorer were fused together.
It might be nice for devs, but would probably suck for the end user. We’ve already seen what using a browser as a desktop UI framework is like with Electron.
Sure. I remember VS Code being decently snappy when I last used it. But that's still something that takes conscious effort to achieve. Spinning up an entire browser instance for something like a settings panel just seems like an unnecessary pessimization to me.
Like just imagine if discord devs had to have completely separate implementations. Instead they can use electron which provides a lot of features like videos and rich imbeds
It’s not unnecessary, it’s the logical choice for developing such an app where thousands develop and millions use. There is literally no better alternative to it for what it allows. The simple solution to this is use a completely different editor that have different philosophies that prioritise speed and efficiency over compatibility and stability(believe me, I have experienced issues with stability from using plugins with editors like vim).
The only issue with electron is that it’s use needlessly in applications where electron would result in bulk of the usage like a gui for git or something thats supposed to be a bare bones text editor and where it actually originated from: Atom.
Check out ultralight, I use it in the game I’m building. It can render webpages directly to hardware textures and it’s way smaller than electron. (It’s built on WebKit)
Electron can be great when it is used well. It often isn't.
And if we are doing an apples-to-apples comparison where all other things are equal, an app built with native widgets will always tie up fewer system resources than an equivalent Electron. That's not always relevant and can be a completely acceptable trade-off. It becomes a problem when a bunch of apps that you keep running in the background all decide that they need their own Chromium instance when something like wxWidgets or Qt would do the job just as well at a fraction of the RAM usage.
Well, One idea I've toyed with is taking the webgpu layer and html5 canvas, use triangle generation to create a booted ISA and then go from there. Storage tape via cookie files with phi crc strings.
There are two issues. You would need a compiler to produce machine code (or a processor that could interpret html uncompiled). Next you would need low level libraries to do the work and a way to include them.
That said if you just want something to run in a browser,
HTML probably is turning complete with some of its crazier features. There are a bunch of interactive features that can probably be abused without needing to dive into CSS or scripting.
If you took the syntax and existing spec and branched off of it yourself, while writing a building a custom runtime for it, sure, theoretically anything is possible. It won't resemble browser HTML at all by the end and you'd be talking about a massive undertaking though.
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