Launching hosted browser service with sound, copy/paste, and printing!

[Lars]

With the above in mind I would advise to persevere in developing what you need or is of use for yourself, and think only afterwards whether others may find it necessary, useful, convenient, worthy, etc.

Thanks, Yes this is what i've decided to do. Proceed with creating what I like and see if others feel likewise or not later.

I just add my 2 cents worth: under my native eCS system, I just do not get enough bandwidth for streaming, no matter what changes I do to inetcfg.ini or tweaking SOCKETSK and CTNRL.EXE commandline parameters in config.sys. When I play your provided .MP4 video in Firefox I can see that playback is faster than data precaching, the video will stop over and over again to preload data.In any case, if streaming does not work in general, then accesing your service and HTML 5 will run into the same problem: too little network bandwidth.

If I run Firefox in a guest in Virtualbox, the network throughput is higher by a factor of 10 without any tweaking to the network parameters at all. Therefore no issue with streaming but unfortunately, audio does not work (something with the setup up, supposedly and probably can be fixed).

And here is the problem: if I run OS/2 under Virtualbox, I simply do not need your service as I can switch over to the host to run a decent browser. And with the shared clipboard between host and guest, I can also copy data (but maybe not as convenient as with your service).

[Neil Waldhauer]

I agree with Lars comments on using VirtualBox on a system that has a decent web browser.

VirtualBox is provided at no cost by Oracle. Oracle can't spell OS/2, and would withdraw VirtualBox or VirtualBox OS/2 support without a thought. So the future is uncertain.

The number of people reading this forum is small. Facebook groups give a much larger audience. Discord is also very small, but distinct from OS/2 World. So once you have a product to sell, I recommend you let people know in as many ways as you can. I recently did a Vintage Computer Festival OS/2 exhibit, and I saw many more former OS/2 users who didn't know about OS/2 World or any other OS/2 places on the internet.

[JTA]

I still can't get a handle on the "number of OS2World viewers" ... because, if we go by thread stats, I see 10's of 1000's, upwards to a few 100k's. On recent threads ... that's a bunch, although I have no idea of their makeup.

What I think I see on this forum is these types of OS/2 users:

1. those who run OS/2 (ArcaOS) natively on old/new hardware. Problems galore (device driver, apps, no x64, no modern browser, etc.). They would benefit from the browser service, if it can be marketed to them. They may also be using RDP or other locally networked machines to get at services (at the cost of more hardware machines, more complexity).

2. those who run OS/2 (ArcaOS) in a VM (virtualbox, with their guest additions). Given a Win10/Linux host os on the hardware of one machine, you can run many OS/2 or ArcaOS vm's, and nearly all problems of this forum go away. With this thread's browser service, or with AToF (using Winflector locally, requiring only a single machine), you can pipe anything into the OS/2 vm's, so you can stay in the OS/2 VM all day, No modern browser problem.

While I don't know if VBox will be around forever, AToF lets you run the same components forever, so it's more a matter of ArcaNoae continuing to provide VBox guest additions for any future ArcaOS versions. If they do, things like this thread's browser service (or AToF) will also run forever.

But, *how folks run their copies of OS/2 (ArcaOS)* is really the key consideration. Many are still of the generation of "one machine, one OS", and if it isn't ArcaOS, or can't be programmed/built for ArcaOS, then it's time to switch. Personal choice, but ...

Solutions like this thread's browser service, or AToF, let you run OS/2, eCS, and ArcaOS nearly forever, on one machine ... and they solve all OS/2 problems ... that's not nothing! Just have to wrap your head around it.

It may not be the OS that is dying ... it may be the older type of OS/2 user (native hardware or bust). Which gets us back to finding and marketing to the newer type of (potential) OS/2 user (virtualized).

Windows is so captive/problematic that the opportunity to switch from it is there ... Linux is capitalizing on this. OS/2 (ArcaOS) can as well.