Building a Better Web Browser - James Mickens - Harvard CS Colloquium 2015
Channel: Paul Irish
Date: 11/12/2015

2015-02-26. CS Colloquium at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Notes from this talk:
* http://blog.rossry.net/notes-james-mickens/

Abstract
Web browsers are defining increasingly rich APIs for networking, multimedia, and local storage. This is good in the sense that web applications can now approach the sophistication of traditional desktop applications. Unfortunately, in the race to add new browser features, discussions about clean interface design are often relegated to second-class status. The result is browsers that are difficult to make robust and secure. Browsers execute so many important applications, and expose so much complex functionality, that they should be treated as operating systems. I will discuss the implications of this claim, using case studies to motivate some core abstractions that browsers should export. I will also discuss some research challenges for building the next generation of browsers.

Bio
James Mickens is an associate professor of computer science at Harvard. Often described as The Hardest Working Man In Computer Science, his research spans genres, fields, and verb tenses. His seminal paper on byzantine fault tolerant proofreading has been mistakenly cited over 3000 times, and his 1987 paper “We Need More and Better Computers” provided the foundation for cloud computing, mobile computing, and any type of computing that benefits from more and/or better computers.

More Mickens:
* http://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
* http://research.microsoft.com/apps/search/default.aspx?q=mickens&s=pu
* http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/251792/149-li.pdf
Domino: Understanding Wide-Area, Asynchronous
Event Causality in Web Applications
* https://vimeo.com/95066828  so so good