A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

Browser Trends: Business Models

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Commercial web applications must overcome a vexing business dilemma: how to make money in the face of so much free competition. This is a symptom of the VC-fueled internet economy that has prevailed since the dot com days. Venture capital firms provide companies with money based on some woolly half-baked ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Apple Edges Towards RIA Viability

Friday, February 8th, 2008

MacRumors is reporting that Apple has shipped a new Safari beta to developers with a number of HTML5 features: audio/video tags, SQL storage, downloadable fonts, CSS transforms/animations and a new DOM function (getElementsByClassName). This puts Apple in pole position among browser vendors with respect to HTML5 support, although Mozilla is ...

Mobile Devices and the Browser Wars

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Michael Calore of Wired delved more deeply into the Opera video that I mentioned yesterday. In particular, he took the logical step of contacting Opera PR to ask about David Rosen's off-the-cuff assertion that they are planning an iPhone port. Opera communications honcho Michelle Valdivia Lien's response is a PR ...