What is web shell and why create it?

Paul Rumkin — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:26:11 +0000

Web shell is a next generation of browsers. Web shell fixes browsers incompleteness and make the Web a self-hosted platform.

Observer is the first web shell. It's built with Electron. It has a lot of features which hasn't announced yet and will be kept in secret for some time 😎 (that's a reason to follow Observer profile).

Short announcement

After a long time I've finally decided to build the Observer as a complete application for demonstration purposes and here it is:

Motivation

So why to build new browser today? In the history of the Web there was two great browser wars: the first has won by Internet Explorer which defeated Netscape Navigator and the second when Firefox defeated IE. The second war finished twelve years ago in 2007. For this twelve years the only thing that has changed is a leader, now it's Chrome.

The second war was caused by poor standard support and backwardness of IE. But today all browsers are supporting standards well, they all works together to solve the issues. What the reason to change something?

This is my reasons:

Modern browsers are just an addition to the operation system's native apps, while they should be the first class citizens and work seamlessly on any platform. Browser should became the one and only application required to cover any user activity.
Browsers aren't secure: Users could not control the code they run! Users couldn't check what web application do! Does it sniff ports or create fingerprint. Publisher could do whatever they want on users' computers!

So what am the goal of Observer? Observer will make the Web a complete and the only platform for running applications.

References

Observer profile.
Observer repository (will be filled with code soon):

DEV Community: Observer

What is web shell and why create it?

Short announcement

Motivation

References

observer0x / observer

The Observer browser