I think that in 20 years we'll have sufficient power to not worry about the bandwidth.

But the lag will still be a BIIIG problem, it will only get bad after some time on the travel to mars, but its a problem ...
Anyone want to discover nem physics ??? I'd like some kind of warp field to send data(and matter).

And not to say i don't like the idea to go to Mars ... but we could do more use of the money spendeing it on our friend earth ^^
Lets give mars another 50 years of wait while we clean our owm mess, or end up dead without going to (or halfway) mars :(

The distance between Earth and Mars varies, from 36 million miles to 250 million miles. Assuming the speed of light in vaccum as the speed of radio waves being sent between Earth and Mars, it would take between 4 and 23 minutes one-way, so a worst-case round-trip time is roughly 45 minutes. (I remember when the first rover was placed on there, that they were dealing with delays of about 15 minutes for the control commands.)

I agree on the basic proxy construction. It'd probably be filtering, as well, one can question the merit of surfing pr0n or the need for all the CSS cosmetics (I could question the need for CSS even today when I'm on Tellus, but I guess that's not very cool).

Generally, it would probably have to be a fully "Web 1.0" experience, somehow I don't see XMLHttpRequest scaling well across a couple million miles of cold space. WHATWG needs to add XMLHttpSpaceRequest.

We also need a Martian localization of Firefox.

(From Alex: Bork! Bork! Bork!)

Existing browsers can't really function that way, at least not directly.

A way to avoid all those multiple requests would be for the server to gzip the whole package, html, css, js, images, everything and just send that. And for cached stuff, the browser could remember what images/css/js are cached and send the filenames of those in the request, so the server wouldn't send those again.

(From Alex: I believe I said that.)

Maybe the next version of HTTP could fix it - have a request header that tells the server to send all the important stuff in the first response. Possibly have a variant of the Accept header to tell the server what's not important.

(From Alex: How? HTTP doesn't care about the contents of what it's transporting, but browsers do.)

Well, the sheltering from radiation problem can be solved along with the propulsion one (estimates say that they would need at least 50t of fuel if they use chemical rockets) if they use magnetic bubble technology. The lag will be a problem that's not likely to be solved anytime soon due to physics. I don't think that there will be some sort of "internet" between Earth and Mars until the first permanently manned bases are built there (and judging by how things are going now in the spaceflight domain, most of us will be havin' a chat with good ol' St.Peter by the time that happens).I guess they'll use something similar to what they use to communicate with the ISS and not really an organized internet-style network. BUt most certainly, there will be an almost constant stream of data to and from Mars.