One of our developers have a little project going on making a Operating System in your browser using Javascript.

I’ll just quote his description:

OS.js started out as a tool to use on my home server so i could run GUI applications to configure services without installing X and a window manager (including VNC or similar remote management) and connect from anywhere in the world just using a web-browser. But lately I’ve also found some other uses for it, mainly HTML5 application development.

Includes a window manager and a simple desktop environment (similar to most Linux envs out there). Standards are inspired by GTK and freedesktop.org.

Applications are developed using Glade Interface Designer (GTK+3 XML) and (optionally) an SQL database XML-scheme.

A built-in compiler creates JavaScript, CSS, SQL and PHP templates from the projects including support for events (signals). One can also create static applications from raw HTML, JS and CSS.

A Virtual Filesystem(VFS) is included. It works with local files, block devices, network connections, compressed files etc.

Applications uses a public API that consists of simple OS operations and calls to the application server-side script and the core libraries (File-system (with restrictions), Networking, Services, Configuration files etc.).

OS.js’ code-base is light-weight and small in size.

JavaScript: < 300kb (minimized, including applications etc.) CSS: < 200 kb (minimized, including applications etc.) XML: < 300 kb (including applications etc.) PHP: < 200 kb

You can find more information at: http://anderse.wordpress.com/os-js/