Comment by mfro

3 days ago

Russ Cox is an absolute legend for committing to this joke.

Someone needs to convince Russ that it would be hilarious to have a full featured web browser in Plan 9.

  • On 9 front there's vmx which is hardware virtualization. You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window.

    I'd also like to point out that most users of Plan 9 dislike web technology because it's a giant nightmare of code. No one human can even begin to comprehend the code base of Chrome, let alone Firefox - programs that are as big, if not bigger than the kernels they run on. That is an absurd state to be in - your runtime requires a billion dollar company to maintain. Even open source Firefox needs millions in funding.

    Whereas a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space. That's the runtime I want, something I can understand. The process is the container on plan 9 so you have everything you need to build distributed apps without a web browser. It's human scale distributed computing. I'd like a future without the "modern" corporate scale web.

    • Oh yes I absolutely agree. I would definitely like to completely replace the web. It's just that in order to (currently) do my banking, pay my bills, book airline tickets, order from Amazon, etc. I must use a browser. If I could escape all that I would run Plan 9 exclusively without another OS or hacks to access a browser from another OS/virtual machine.

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    • > a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space.

      Is that true? I cloned the 2015 release of plan 9 a week or so ago and it had around a million lines of C. Can a single person hold all of that? I sure as hell can’t.

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    • > You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window.

      Not only is the VNC redirection unnecessary, so it is the entire filesystem. You could just render the vm directly to the window and boot a read only image. Plus then you don't have to deal with VNC.

  • Doesn’t plan9 support frame buffers over 9p or something like that? You could probably write a wrapper that just forwards a Linux browser to a plan9 window

  • Yeah, convince Russ and some investors! :D I would laugh my ass off for years at this joke! Yeah, please do this next year's April Fools'!

    • > I would laugh my ass off for years at this joke!

      I don't really get the 'joke'? Porting a full web browser to Plan 9 would seem like a cool project - where's the humor?

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