Thursday, September 11th, 2008
I have my Twitter set up to show me all tweets with the word "prism" in them, and over the past few days I've seen a surprising number along the lines of "I'm dumping Prism in favor of Chrome web apps". This is how I first found out how badly ...
Tags: chrome, firefox, prism, ssb | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
September is here, and I'm slipping out of a mild off-season hibernation after a relatively laidback summer ("relative" being the operative word when you're coming off ten years of stressful startup life). In particular, this blog has been sorely neglected. I'm planning to ramp things up once again, and what ...
Tags: chrome, firefox, google, ie, javascript, mozilla, ssb | 7 Comments »
Friday, April 25th, 2008
Traditionally browsing architectures have had a rather arbitrary separation between the rendering engine (suitable for embedding and reuse) and the browser user interface (not so much). These terms are a bit misleading because "rendering" necessarily entails far more than just painting HTML on the screen; the core engine is likely ...
Tags: architecture, fluid, prism, ssb | 4 Comments »
Monday, April 7th, 2008
My first guest post for TechCrunch, on the subject of single-site browsers, attracted a lot of interest and no small number of questions. Without seeing them in action, it's pretty hard to grasp what's so great about what sounds like a stripped down, less functional version of a normal web ...
Tags: air, bubbles, fluid, prism, ssb, standards, techcrunch | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
In my new incarnation as an independent software development consultant (read: programmer who works in his pajamas), I need to track the hours that I spend working for my clients. I've been using SlimTimer, a simple but wholly sufficient web app (highly recommended). It displays a nifty floating browser window ...
Tags: prism, slimtimer, ssb | 3 Comments »
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 ...
Tags: prism, ssb, zimbra | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
All the communication around Google Gears seems to center on its role in adding offline storage capabilities to the browser. In reality, Google's vision for the product goes far beyond this. On his personal blog, Gears developer Dion Almaer spills the beans on the sprawling array of services they are ...
Tags: gears, google, ssb, standards, whatwg | 5 Comments »
Monday, January 14th, 2008
One thing that clearly differentiates web apps from their desktop counterparts is that the former run inside a tab or page in the web browser rather than in their own process. This has a number of drawbacks, several of which are elegantly set forth in the blog post announcing the ...
Tags: adobe, air, fluid, gears, google, mozilla, prism, sqlite, ssb, trends | 3 Comments »