The developers of the PLASMA lab at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst have built a Unix-like operating system for your web browser simply to overcome the limitation of web browsers.
Now You Can Run Unix-like Operating System In Your Browser
We all know very well that current web browsers are excellent for reading blogs, playing videos small games and not only that they are even efficient for building user interfaces. What if I say you to use them as a platform through which you could code few heavy applications. Of course, you are thinking right, yes, they will simply fail.
So, did you know why? Let me clear, if we say about the applications then they simply depend on the standard OS APIs and it is something essential which the web browsers do not support, and compiling code to JavaScript doesn’t work.
But, hold on, what if I say all that now you can simply run all those things in your web browser itself? Sounds interesting right, Yes, now you can, as a team of developers from the University of the Massachusetts, Amherst, has built a Unix-like operating system for your web browser.
And the most interesting thing about this Unix-like operating system is, it uses a JS based kernel and simply extends the JavaScript runtimes for the languages like C, C++, Go, and Node.js programs and not only that as it also comes with a POSIX-like shell it stands for Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) which is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems.
Now many of you might be thinking that ‘what is UNIX?’ Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, developed in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
So, the operating systems like Unix allow the user to build applications with efficiency. But, as we told earlier that a team of developers from the University of the Massachusetts, Amherst, has built a Unix-like operating system for your web browser simply to overcome the limitation of web browsers.
Hence, the PLASMA lab at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst has created “Browsix“.
What is Browsix?
According to the Browsix Official Site, “Programs written to run on conventional operating systems typically depend on OS abstractions like processes, pipes, signals, sockets, and a shared file system. Compiling programs into JavaScript, asm.js, or WebAssembly with tools like Emscripten or GopherJS isn’t enough to successfully run many programs client-side, as browsers present a non-traditional runtime environment that lacks OS functionality. Porting these applications to the web currently requires extensive rewriting or paying to host significant portions of code in the cloud”.
So, if you want to try the Browsix right now on your browser then simply click here and run the Unix-Like operating system in your browser instantly.
