A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

Archive for February, 2008

Browsers and Commoditization

Friday, February 29th, 2008

Vladimir Vukićević of Mozilla made waves yesterday with the discovery that Apple's Webkit (the engine that powers the Safari browser) uses undocumented OS X features that are not available to other browsers running on the Macintosh. This is unlikely to point to a simmering conspiracy on the part of Apple, ...

More on the Open Web

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

There were so many great comments on yesterday's post that I have material for at least two follow-ups. I'll talk more about the new DRM capabilities of Adobe Flash tomorrow, but first let me clarify a couple of points about the open web. Considering that most people reading this are ...

AIR, Flex and the Open Web

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

With the official release yesterday of Adobe AIR and Flex 3, it's worth taking another look at the question of what these products mean for the evolution of the web. Criticism of Adobe for the proprietary nature of its technology is hardly novel. A widely read piece by Ted Leung ...

Opera Employee Hints at Secret Dragonfly Project

Monday, February 25th, 2008

Opera's David Storey, who lists his job title as "Chief Web Opener", posted an intriguing entry on his blog where he hints at a supersecret project in the works, codenamed Dragonfly: So what exactly is Opera Dragonfly? I won't say quite yet, but I do think that, in my opinion, it ...

Do We Really Want the European Commission to Regulate the Web?

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie continues to promote and defend his company's legal action against Microsoft for anti-competitive practices with a guest editorial in The Register. One thing seems incontrovertible: Microsoft should not be allowed to tie Internet Explorer to Windows and strong-arm hardware manufacturers into refusing bundling deals with ...

Google Announces Gears 0.2

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

It's a big day for product announcements, apparently. Hot on the heels of the new Flock beta, Google has announced that a new version of its Gears browser plugin is available. (Well actually it looks like the Gears team blogged their release first, but in my RSS reader breaking news ...

Flock 1.1 Now in Public Beta

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

I'm keen to put Flock 1.1 through its paces, now that the beta is publicly available. It looks like this will be the next Browser of the Week, perhaps as soon as next week. Naturally I'll keep in mind that it's still a beta product.

A Week at the Opera, Conclusions

Friday, February 15th, 2008

My week-long adventure with Opera is coming to a close, and it's undeniably a solid, professional product. One thing that struck me is how many nice little convenience features it provides: VCR controls to "rewind" and "fast forward", in addition to the standard back and forward buttons. Rewind takes you to ...

Zimbra Adopts Prism

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

In my first article about site-specific browsers, I concluded with a somewhat conservative assessment of the state of the technology: It’s extremely early days for all of these products. I wouldn’t recommend any of them for use by mainstream users, but if you’re technically minded enough to be reading this you’re ...

Flash on the iPhone?… Probably Not

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

There's a reason that they call them rumors. The other day, a lot of sources (including Just Browsing) were pointing to a Gear Live article claiming that Flash support for the iPhone web browser is just around the corner. Ryan Stewart, who works for Adobe, doesn't rule out the possibility ...