title: What research-operating-system features would you advocate including in Google Chrome Operating System
body: <p>Imagine that a large player is undertaking the construction of a new operating system, where backward compatibility requirements are limited to:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Run existing applications written in (or compiled to) JavaScript which are presented in HTML5 and styled with CSS3</p></li>
  <li><p>Plug and play support for printers, external storage, and optical drives</p></li>
  <li><p>Degrade gracefully when disconnected from the internet</p></li>
  <li><p>Sufficient process quotas to support safely permitting tasks to run in the background, including timers</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>What specific features from existing research operating systems (such as <a href="http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/FAQ/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Plan 9</a>) would you like to see enter the mainstream through this channel?  Please limit your suggestions to things that have been implemented, and provide a link to the implementation (or at least search terms).</p>
  
  <p>From the <a href="http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Plan 9 docs</a>: </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Plan 9 began in the late 1980’s as an
    attempt to have it both ways: to build
    a system that was centrally
    administered and cost-effective using
    cheap modern microcomputers as its
    computing elements.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Netbooks qualify as cheap modern microcomputers, and The Cloud qualifies as centrally administered.  There is an opportunity to implement the features (in DDaviesBrackett's words) that we want netbooks to have other than by extending a 1970's time-sharing OS; the research operating systems may have proved the value of alternatives by example.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>From <a href="http://www.faqs.org/faqs/comp-os/plan9-faq/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the Plan 9 FAQ</a>:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p><em>Subject: What are its key ideas?</em></p>
    
    <p>Plan 9 exploits, as far as possible,
    three basic technical ideas: first,
    all the system objects present
    themselves as named files that are
    manipulated by read/write operations;
    second, all these files may exist
    either locally or remotely, and
    respond to a standard protocol; third,
    the file system name space - the set
    of objects visible to a program - is
    dynamically and individually
    adjustable for each of the programs
    running on a particular machine. The
    first two of these ideas were
    foreshadowed in Unix and to a lesser
    extent in other systems, while the
    third is new: it allows a new
    engineering solution to the problems
    of distributed computing and graphics.
    Plan 9's approach means that
    application programs don't need to
    know where they are running; where,
    and on what kind of machine, to run a
    Plan 9 program is an economic decision
    that doesn't affect the construction
    of the application itself.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Does that not appear to be an excellent fit for the netbook/Cloud domain?</p>