Recently, I was having a look at the most popular Web Operating Systems (also known as WebOS) such as EyeOS and YouOS. Some of them look really impressive, some of them are bit ugly but the raising question is: Do we really need just another operating system inside our browser?

Personally, I can’t see any use in the concept of Web Operating Systems at the moment. As many of you, I prefer to open TextEdit on my laptop instead of browsing into a WebOS and use its text editor. Particularly, I don’t like the multiple-windows-inside-a-single-one idea. However, lately I catch my self using “View as HTML” and “Open as a Google document” options for GMail attachments! Why? It’s much easier and faster to view documents or even edit them online via Google Documents!

A large number of interesting online applications exist at the moment and more are to follow, that’s for sure. Online applications and services are accessible by everywhere and they are upgraded continuously according to their users’ needs and preferences. For instance, the recent updates of Flickr were developed after thousands of relative requests. Apart from these benefits, online applications are accompanied with two great advantages. First of all, they have been built to serve a particular need and to support a particular task. Secondly, they offer APIs or at least they are able to co-operate perfectly well with other online applications if necessary. Take Remember the milk for example; it can be embedded in Google Calendar and as one might expect its features are accessible through Google Calendar.

It’s clear that online applications and services can cover more than the basic needs and some of them are able to compete even with traditional desktop applications. GMail is a great example. So, as an answer to my question I could say that we need a kind of wrapper for online applications at the moment. We don’t need an operating system in our browser! Or at least, we don’t need a WebOS that looks identical to our desktop.

Start pages like iGoogle and NetVibes can be considered as wrappers to online applications. Despite the fact that they serve mainly as personalized start pages, they allow us to interact with other online applications through widgets. For example, I use iGoogle and I am able to send and view emails (GMail) and manage my tasks (Remember The Milk) and my documents (Google Documents) through a single page. Furthermore, I can view the recent activity on my photostream (Flickr) and blog (WordPress). Oh, and I can even stay tuned to my RSS feeds (Google Reader). The offered widgets are very handy and usefull but I would like to be able to do more; like opening and modifying an image from my Flickr widget in an online image editor or dragging a document over the GMail widget and sent it as an attachment to a friend of mine.

I am aware that such kind of stuff is a bit hard at the moment but I am looking forward for them. The good news are that even more and more online applications  co-operate with each other and release their APIs, which means that third part developers are able to enhance them!