Having almost limitless resources does not mean you can waste them. The calculator feature of Google web search is a tiny, perfect example of a such a waste. Every time you write something like 1500/1.208 into the search field of Google, the string is sent over to a Google server, a Google CPU computes the results and send it back to you.

Jeez! All this data are going back and forth between my laptop and a Google server to perform some simple arithmetics while several Gigaflops of computing power are available right on my CPU.

On the other hand we have Calcoolate.com: a nice web application from the same guys of iRows. It’s a calculator that get it right: its interface doesn’t mimics conventional pocket calculators and it lets my browser do the math!

I understand that this comparison is a bit far fetched since the calculator capabilities of Google are a marginal feature of the search engine, but it came handy to make my point: browsers could and should do a lot more!

Phil Leitch at Sundog has a very detailed review

Built with the philosophy that everything should be Web-based, Calcoolate is an Ajax-based calculator that’s lickety split fast because it does all the work using your computer with no calls back to a server. […] Kind of amazing that a calculator would remember more than one result at a time isn’t it? Each result in your history can be given a name and used as a variable in future calculations.[…] It’s a simple site but it serves a useful purpose and does it quite well, effictively killing off one more desktop app in the process.

It’s surprising to see how, during the last fifteen years, browser functionalities were extended to include lots of futile stuff like handling animated GIFs or smooth scrolling, while core arithmetic capabilities were always ignored.

As of today, Javascripts are the most common way to do some math within the browser and, I have to say, it’s neither efficient nor pleasant. If the next generation of browsers could exhibit a standard, fast and native implementation of math functions to be called by Javascripts, the browser could become an ubiquitous platform for computing.