Recursion

Its significance crept up on me; Chrome, the Chrome Web Store and the classic icon launch metaphor now used in Chrome's New Tab home screen.

GOOGLE CHROME

Set out in this way, the manner in which the Chrome browser presents web apps is eerily familiar; the lines ever blurring where a once hard separation between operating system and app used to exist. At first viewing you regard the presentation of these apps as really web page bookmarks which is, from a PC era standpoint, precisely what they are.

But then try to abstract and set aside any long term notion you may hold of the classic operating system paradigm and then refill that space in your head with the simple notion of a just a generic device, any device.

Then things start to resort, realign and get interesting.