A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

Archive for March, 2008

Apple Ramps Up Its iPhone RIA Platform

Monday, March 31st, 2008

While industry observers focus on AIR and Silverlight, efforts by Adobe and Microsoft respectively to implement their vision of a more compelling web experience, Apple is slowly slipping in through the backdoor. The other day I hypothesized that Apple's aggressive tactics for pushing Safari on Windows users were all about ...

The Social Web Browser

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

Despite the explosion of all things social onto the internet scene, it is becoming clear that current mechanisms for sharing information among social groups are nothing more than a stopgap measure and not an inherently satisfying solution. Users complain of Facebook fatigue and Twitter overload, as well as the unappealing ...

Is Apple Gunning for Firefox?

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Update: I got a couple of comments very quickly from Mozilla people complaining that this post is rehashing old news and is needlessly inflammatory.  I admit that I did hesitate to address this topic since the keynote in question was so long ago, but I felt like the issue was ...

Apple’s Safari Push is Not About the Money

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Apple has been causing a stir with its heavy-handed tactics for pushing Safari onto Windows users. Those who have iTunes, whether or not they have ever installed Safari, are apparently getting an automatic update dialog proposing to "upgrade" to the latest versions of both products. Reactions range from that of ...

The Mozilla/WebKit Arms Race

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Biologists talk about a phenomenon called the evolutionary arms race. Cheetahs, for example, only survived if they were fast enough to catch the slowest gazelles. Gazelles, on the other hand, only lived to produce offspring if they could outrun the fastest predators. These are powerful evolutionary forces, and as a ...

Adobe’s Quest for Web Domination

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

With the announcement of the first official release of AIR, all eyes have been on Adobe's ambitions in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. But Adobe also has far-reaching plans to add new features to its Flash runtime with big implications for the web, both inside the browser and out. Content ...

I’m Not Sure Microsoft Gets This Open Thing

Friday, March 7th, 2008

I went to download a whitepaper about one of Microsoft's new web browser extensions and was presented with the following message: To download the file you must agree to the following license: Microsoft Public License ...

Steve Jobs Says Flash Sucks

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Well, actually he didn't. When CNet initially reported on the last Apple shareholder meeting, his comments about Flash on the iPhone, buried in a list of bullet points, seemed innocent enough: Turning back to the iPhone, don't expect support for Adobe's Flash technology anytime soon. The full-blown PC Flash version "performs ...

Microsoft, Good Standards Citizen

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

In response to widespread outrage at their decision to make the Internet Explorer 8 handle web pages by default in the same broken way as IE7, Microsoft has now announced that they have seen the light: Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” ...

Firefox and the Mozilla Platform

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

The subject of the Mozilla platform ("Gecko") and its relevance beyond serving as the foundation of Firefox has been a subject of great debate for quite some time. The topic flared up again this weekend on one of Mozilla's developer newsgroups. The impetus appears to have been a relatively obscure ...