It sounds like an ambitious idea, but Mozilla has had their "Firefox Sync" product (née Weave) available as a developer release for some time now:<p><a href="https://mozillalabs.com/sync/" rel="nofollow">https://mozillalabs.com/sync/</a><p>Basically, it synchronises your saved passwords, browsing history, and open tabs between different machines with Sync installed. If you use Firefox Mobile (née Fennec), you can open a tab from your desktop machine on your mobile device, and vice-versa. Mozilla have even announced an iPhone client that (presumably) launches Safari instead of Firefox, but still gives you access to your open tabs and history:<p><a href="http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/26/firefox-home-coming-soon-to-the-iphone/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/26/firefox-home-coming-...</a>
Sun kind of did this in 1999 with the Sun Ray (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray</a>)<p><i>This enables another notable feature of the Sun Ray, portable sessions: a user can go from one Sun Ray to another and continue their work without closing any programs. With a smartcard, all the user has to do is slip in the card, enter their password when prompted, and they will be presented with their session.</i>
I see this as problematic. Throw in different screen sizes, different input methods, and different operating systems, and what do you get? Maddening chaos for application developers, meaning it wouldn't be supported.<p>Can you imagine the support tickets? "Outlook doesn't look right on my cell phone." "I can't swipe in iBooks on my Eee." It's the ultimate epitome of the problem with Android's fracturing across devices (which is, thankfully, not too bad).
This exists already, in a few different forms.<p>The obvious ones are VNC and GNU Screen, but the fundamental problem with these is that the client is too dumb and can't adapt to different form factors. The client needs to talk to the server in much higher level, more abstract terms.<p>This is where REST comes in. If you can sync URIs between devices, then <i>RE</i>presentations of application <i>S</i>tates can be <i>T</i>ransferred to and from each device, and you <i>should</i> be able to seamlessly move sessions around, in theory.<p>In practice, not all web apps are properly RESTful and so won't work this way, though the landscape is certainly improving in this regard.<p>Also, not all apps are web apps, nor should they be. But a URI doesn't have to be a web page. I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Android provides some sort of facility for native applications to intercept and handle arbitrary URIs. This could be used, for example, by a native Twitter client to show the equivalent native interface for a URI on the Twitter site.
Is he being satirical? I think it sounds like a good idea.<p>I think you'll see it come together from two separate places.<p>1. Standardization of browser event subscription by a remote host. This might happen via an HTML5+ ecmascript API in which scripts register user event callbacks. Think ACPI through JS. This requires aware applications but Google could make it a de facto standard.<p>2. In-browser identity management and single sign-on. This is necessary to achieve the seamless re-authentication to services. This may be in the form of a browser plugin that, like regularfry says, saves to cloud storage. I think we'll see browsers grow web-aware state APIs in the next 5 years as local and remote get blurrier and blurrier.<p>What do you think?
My friends and I began working on building a service which provides this functionality not long ago -- we planned to offer an application service available through the web browser, but after Google announced the Chrome Web Store, we may pivot to build applications suited toward that arena. There's a lot of ways to use this, and we can't wait to show them to the world.
Well, I connect to my workstation on my laptop with remote desktop.<p>This way I can use my netbook on the road and still have the quadcore gpu, multiple vm's and the open tabs in firefox.