Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
I was chatting recently with the founder of a high-profile startup that is making strategic use of Mozilla technology. "People keep telling me that WebKit is the future," he complained. "Have we made the wrong choice?"
I did my best to reassure him of course, providing arguments that support their choice ...
Tags: apple, chrome, firefox, flock, google, mozilla, platform, webkit | 28 Comments »
Monday, February 9th, 2009
I've read the Economist religiously for over 15 years. For many of those years I bought a copy every week at the newsstand, and I've subscribed for the past couple of years. A few weeks ago, I let my subscription lapse. The reason is a web service-cum-iPhone application called Instapaper. ...
Tags: amazon, apple, clay shirky, instapaper, iphone, media, money, offline | 30 Comments »
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
It's not often that I get to repudiate completely my most recent blog post a few days after publishing it. But anyone who is not yet convinced that the answer to the question of whether web apps are an endangered species is an emphatic "no" should run, not walk, to ...
Tags: adobe, apple, cocoa, flash, ria, sproutcore | 2 Comments »
Friday, July 25th, 2008
The launch of the iPhone App Store got me thinking about the future of web apps. After all, Apple had initially announced that the SDK for the iPhone would be Safari. In other words, iPhone applications would be web apps. As a proponent of using web technologies for application development, ...
Tags: apple, iphone, software | 3 Comments »
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 ...
Tags: apple, firefox, flock, microsoft, money, mozilla, opera, trends | 2 Comments »
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 ...
Tags: apple, html5, iphone, offline, ria | 2 Comments »
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 ...
Tags: apple, firefox, market, mozilla, safari | 10 Comments »
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 ...
Tags: apple, google, money, mozilla, ria, safari, webkit | 7 Comments »
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 ...
Tags: apple, flash, iphone | 8 Comments »
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, ...
Tags: apple, browser market, firefox, mozilla, webkit | 3 Comments »