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Show HN: Sava OS – A desktop interface for your web browser

(savaos.com)
103 points owenfar | 2 comments | 17 Oct 24 16:20 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Hello, I'm Owen, co-founder of Sava OS.

I think you've heard this a thousand times by now; "We spend most of our time on the web browser, yet nothing has changed." And then a "revolutionary" product comes out that puts our links & tabs collapsed on the side, with some extra features. Magical, right :)?

Well, we tried a lot of these products, and we also tried building one ourselves about 8years ago. But we felt like no UI can handle the same kind of organization our desktop can, and that's when the idea first came to our mind ~5years ago. For the past year, we worked on the side to build the MVP you see today. But along these years, a lot of thoughts kept popping up, and that's why this product has an OS in it's name (it's still cooking :).

Unlike other desktop-like products that are accessible on the browser, Sava OS is not only built and made to run natively on the web browser, but it actually has some useful features to help with your browsing management - and that's only the beginning.

There's still a lot to consider when it comes to shaping a modern, desktop-like UI that meets today's needs.. We’ve got some exciting ideas and aim to go beyond the traditional approach.

We would really love to hear your take on this.

1. Lerc ◴[17 Oct 24 19:22 UTC] No.41872879[source]▶
I have had a go at building one of these.

https://fingswotidun.com/images/notanos_4.png

It was predominantly designed to be as dumb a server as possible and do everything client side. It implemented a basic file IO interface so you can write files and get directory listings.

Anything fancy client side could be leveraged by the ability to execute commands on the server and providing a local named socket for commands to connect to to establish a websocket connection to the client. The core server then plays no further part and it's up to the executed command to send a message to open a window and provide the html/js for the content which will handle all future websocket messages for that window. Essentially all windowed apps with a complex server side component are free to implement their own protocol.

That simple architecture allowed me to construct some nice interactions https://fingswotidun.com/images/notanos_drag_drop.gif

I didn't think it could be a commercial product though. I appreciate that being a 'Product' might afford one the resources to develop such a thing more fully, but then it is just another thing to buy.

I fundamentally believe that things like this have to be free and open source to be viable long term. Otherwise you just have an impressive dead-end like GeoWorks was, back in the day.

replies(1): >>41873412 #
2. owenfar ◴[17 Oct 24 20:26 UTC] No.41873412[source]▶
We're definitely going to make this open-source. But the code and especially the documentation is not ready for that yet