Thanks for sharing. Very interesting presentation. As soon as he said the browser is the new OS he lost me, but I understand he's coming from the Internet Industry. I completely agree that we need to design secure application architecture though, and that's why I am excited about languages like Go which facilitate a new client server model that doesn't involve the browser.
The browser took over that throne 10 or 15 years ago, with the rise of web 2.0. We make and download way, way more applications that run in web browsers (aka every web site) than applications that run on Windows, OSX, or any other OS.
I have a deck somewhere illustrating this. My team supported something like 500 installed applications with more than 50 users across a 30,000 user base in 2004 or so. Programmers were churning out PowerBuilder and VB apps, all of which sucked to varying degrees.
Today, I'm not on that team, but the number is something like 50-75. I cannot remember the last time I saw a new bespoke client/server app.
No denying there was lots of breakage back then, and you would have to go back to the late 90's to find the days when Powerbuilder and VB were new. Developers making mobile apps don't assume the browser is the platform. Developers making games don't assume the browser is the platform (even though there are plenty of in-browser games), but it seems we don't question the browser for every other solution. All the recent development in sockets, channels, messaging, etc. has reopened the box of potential solutions for non-browser client server, IMHO.
