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Google Chrome: the New Web Platform?
snydeq writes "The Chrome dev team is working toward a vision of Web apps that offers a clean break from traditional websites, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister, in response to Google's new Field Guide for Web Applications. 'When you add it up, it starts to look as though, for all the noise Google makes about Web standards, Chrome is moving further and further apart from competing browsers, just by virtue of its technological advantages. In that sense, maybe Chrome isn't just a Web browser; maybe Chrome itself is the platform — or is becoming one.'"
First of all, this was submitted by someone from Infoworld, and the article is on Infoworld, so nice spam.
Second, web platforms are dead, and native apps that call web services are the new rage. It's just a better experience. Web platforms have been tried before since the 90s--see Java applets and ActiveX--and the experience is always poor. Nobody wants ChromeOS over iOS, Android, etc. Google has offered Native Client and Dart to compete performance-wise, but those are non-standard, Google-specific technologies (Dart as a language has been criticized pretty heavily on its own), and there's just something weird about shoving the web browser into the stack as a middle-man for no reason.
Third, and this will sound flamebait-ey so take it as personal opinion, but forgive me if I'm a little uncomfortable with a multi-billion dollar web advertising company with a history of privacy violations tracking everything I do at an OS level. It'd be like installing an operating system written by DoubleClick. I'd rather limit my data exposure to the occasional web search or Gmail message, thanks.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Or is there any other way this can be interpreted?
How about we all just stick with official standards and co-habitate?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yeah! Back to ie6..
And we can all imagine a future where everything is on the cloud and that.
But I've already seen a couple of cloud services go and take all my acquired know-how with them (and one time, a chunk of my workflow).
Has anyone here tried using grooveshark lately? Notice how it works like shit and there's not a thing you can do about it?
Well, there's web apps for you.
It's pretty obvious Google are trying to make a "web platform" with Dart and NaCL. Most people spend a lot of time using the web, probably most of the time in front of the computer is web-time. When I use the web, which is a lot I want a better experience, I want native speed, I want real apps and games delivered on the web. If Google can give me that, more power to them. So far their technologies is open source, so I see little wrong from their doings. I don't like installing crap on my computer, phone or "pad", if apps can be delivered over the web, all the better.
Seeing the web as a glorified publishing tool as it is today is old school. Google should have WOW ported to NaCL, that would give it a boost.
The only people who will fall for this are clueless CEOs who still have their heads in the cloud.
Nothing that I can see. Lean and serves the purpose very well. Just as useful as paper and as easy to handle.
Of course there are always those that want to blink and animate and visually scream at you in order to capture your attention. That is something traditional webpages do not do or do not do well, and that is actually one of their advantages, as really the only purpose this serves is advertising. Personally, I have blocked any animated add for years now, and the web has a cleaner, calmer and far more pleasant look to me because of it. (Blocking is via Opera integrated content-blocker.) For me, the web is a library, and the clean look of wikipedia the ideal. I do not want another wannabe television surrogate. I have dropped TV more than 10 years ago, because it became intolerable.
This angle would also explain why Google wants to break away from it: Their main business is wasting peoples time, i.e. serving them ads. (Which is, in itself pretty evil, all things considered. But hey, nobody believes the "don't be evil" mantra anyways today.) This also includes getting as much statistical data as they can. Both the serving and the snooping works far better when you leave traditional webpages behind.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
People who worship Google as a paragon of virtue are no smarter than people who worship any other company, whether it's Apple of Microsoft or Red Hat or whoever. Every company's agenda is to compete and win, gaining power and making money. I have no problem with that. That's just the way the market works. The problem comes when gullible people believe a company's PR rhetoric about peace, love and freedom -- or whatever they're selling that day. Google isn't your friend. Google is a huge corporation that provides services in its effort to win more dollars in the long run. Those who think that Google is doing "open" things out of the goodness of their hearts in order to make the world a better place are either stupid or naive. They're a huge company that's competing to own as much as it can. If you like its services, use them. But understand this. When you are using "free" services, the company is making money some other way -- and it's almost always the case that YOU have become the product that they're selling to someone else. If that's OK with you, fine. But you need to understand reality instead of thinking you're getting something free. You pay in one way or another. With Google, you pay by giving up your information and privacy. But that's your choice.
Last I checked, Google didn't really control the development of WebKit, and JavaScript is based on standards - so unless there's evidence Chrome intends to start down the old proprietay-extensions path Microsoft blazed 10-15 years ago with Internet Explorer, I'm not sure how "web apps" became synonymous with "Chrome as an exclusive platform".
Now - as the article points out - Google has proposed some ideas (e.g. Dart) that break from the past; but 1) as far as I can tell, they haven't tried to lock others out, and 2) there's currently no evidence these new ideas will ever gain any real-world traction (actually, #2 is probably the more important point by far). Many of us are old enough to remember the pain Microsoft's proprietary browser caused - and most of us will steer clear of anything that looks like an attempt to bring back that model.
#DeleteChrome
But Google analytics to track http://Lenny.com but it doesn't work properly I have to switch back to windows to see the charts.
I updated Flash but it still won't work
any suggestions?
. . . and Google is using the same old monopolistic devices to sell it.
Starting a real web platform's been tried before(netscape)
Its much harder than it looks, and ultimately, we're protected by those firms still using ie6 in this day and age. They slow down adoption enough for people to breathe and smell the roses.
At the end of the day the relationship between user, platform builder and 3 rd party dev has(so far) always been much more contentious than expected, and usually to the detriment of anyone but the app devs
Oh Chrome is Becoming a Thing? Bitch Please. Tell that to all the IE users. Here's a thing: THING
-------------------------------------
Technically, we are beyond survival.
I have two laptops. A MacBook Pro with an Ubuntu partition, and Samsung Chromebook, I really like both. Many here comment negatively about Chromebooks and my guess it is mainly those that do not won them. I use my MacBook in reality as a desktop, and when I travel I PREFER the Chromebook. I would like to see a Chrome tablet, and would prefer that to an iOS or Android platform for the tasks tablets do. Until you use a Chromebook in real life, and see most of the negative " can't do anything without internet access " are over blown, don't knock it.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Almost everything in the "Field Guide" is supported across browsers --- which is good and proper, but it's not pointing the way to Chrome-only applications like the Infoworld article suggests.
Apparently in the Infoworld article, Chrome's "technical advantages" are NaCl and Dart (not mentioned in the "Field Guide"). NaCl is bad for the Web in multiple ways. It ties Web apps to specific processor architectures. (PNaCl is going nowhere because LLVM bitcode is not actually architecture-independent.) Worse, it creates a huge new set of Web APIs ("Pepper") for NaCl applications that mostly duplicate the functionality of the standards-based APIs we already have. This is a lot of unnecessary bloat, complexity and attack surface, plus a lot of extra standards work that would have to be done if NaCl were to be come a real cross-browser standard (which it won't, because no other browser vendor has shown interest in implementing it). The performance advantages of NaCl are overrated; C-to-JS compilers like Emscripten are rapidly improving, the JS language and implementations are rapidly improving, and for a lot of modern apps you want to be offloading to the GPU anyway.
Dart is unnecessary and will simply be overtaken by improvements to Javascript.
The goal of Google is to move everything into the cloud, which is their domain. But they are not stupid, and while they are certainly trying, they won't force stuff like that when it doesn't work. So while Google will certainly try to make Chrome a new platform, whether it becomes one or not doesn't depend only on them.
Apps are not the future. They are the past.
Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software. You just enter an address or click a link and you get to the most up to date "app". No installation, no updates, no permissions, no specific OS or hardware necessary. It works everywhere by everyone and all the time with no hassles.
The reason apps made a comeback is because you can charge for apps. An app is a defined thing and an installation is a chargeable privilege. So thank Apple and all the me-too followers for burdening us with software deployment and management just as we were about to escape those unnecessary activities.
Apps as platform is not driven by mobile OSes, browsers or other modern technology. It is driven by capitalism.
Imagine being able to do all your work in the form of Slashdot discussions. With SlashdotML, Slashdotscript, SlashdotOS and libSlashdot. We even have a javascript-to-slashdotscript in the works. Get your Slashdotbook and Slashdotpad today.
Hey, at least somebody finally wants to screw me!
It was easy. I just took the 1995 hype about Netscape Navigator as an application platform, and changed the names.
I got the idea after watching the Java guys do this, in 1996.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is a pretty common prediction. I remember back in the 90s IE and Netscape were going to be the new application platform. Five years ago there were claims Firefox was going to be its own platform. Now Google is going to make Chrome the new platform? No, it never works out that way. Locally running apps calling web services is certainly possible, but the browser isn't (and hasn't been) a good platform for application development.
They said that 10 years ago. The browser was to break the MS monopoly, obsolete the OS, really soon now everything would be running in the browser, yada, yada, yada.
Every few years, someone digs up a dead horse and runs it through town again.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Heh, I suspected the unreliability of that list and now I know. Thanks for confirming my opinion. Tell me.... are you employed by the PR department of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, or are you just in it for the lulz?
So I'll be able to control my my MIDI synthesizer in real-time? And I won't even have to have an OS? Smoke that Obama gold crack cocaine my friend. Keep smoking it.
The reason it went away "10 years ago" was due to bandwidth - now that the bandwidth is here, we're ready to move forward. The web platform and can will deliver on it's the promises - it's already making significant waves
Agree 110%, fuck off!
Let us not forget that Google is _the_ corporation that makes its money by knowing as much as possible of what users (and that includes you) do on the Web. It is their business model.
I'm not familiar with DNS nor with plugins allowing to block content. I'm both using Linux and OS X and I'd like that piece of sh*t that the InfoWorld website is to never appear again when I click on a link.
How simple can it be to block these lowlifes at InfoWorld once and for all?
Thank about this:
edit, when the time every application evolved to sending email, why browsers never do editing well?
form, in the old times terminals wanting to be form handlers, why browsers never do form well?
pulling syncing why browsers get bigger eat more ram but never do things well?
HTML never learn footnote and math, so how about music notes, drawings, flowchart, and other knowledge representation?
We need to make standard for representing all knowledges
Better to moderate with words than "points".
Bad speech is better defeated with good speech than with "moderation".
Seems like an amazing amount of information. How did you learn all this? How do I know it's all true?
It all seems so odd.
From some dope at Microsoft friendly infoworld.
1) ChromeOS can run on any common platform.
2) Dart is going to be opensource. Anybody can incorporate Dart into their browser.
3) Dart can be compiled to JavaScript.
4) HTML5 etc. are also free to be used by anybody
Add it up: Google Chrome will be no more a web platform than any other browser.
Google's technologies' are open for adoption by anyone and they have the habit of improving the Internet, not subverting it.
Wish I had mod points. At least somebody on slashdot is thinking straight.
Anybody else remember .HTA HTML Applications? Sounds like that idea, resurrected.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496(v=vs.85).aspx
With Google, you pay by giving up your information and privacy.
You don't even have to login to use google. Google does not even know who you are, unless you want Google to know.
Yes, google uses you search information to display innocuous ads by the side of the page, so what?
Google may not deserve to be worshiped as a paragon of virtue; but I don't see Google filing dozens of bogus lawsuits, using total junk patents, like Apple and Microsoft routinely do. I don't see Google being an abusive monopoly, like Microsoft. I don't see Google trying to prevent the use of competitor's technology by forcing proprietary standards like OOXML, and Silverlight. I don't see where Google has been caught red-handed astroturfing, or hiring shills on message boards. I don't see a US federal judge accusing Google of using "Tonya Harding tactics." I don't see google hiring shill companies to do fake TCO studies, or benchmark studies. I don't see Google caught red-handed outright lying to the US DoJ. I don't see Google caught red-handed bribing OSI officials.
N/A.
Gotta agree, native networked apps have some big advantages - fast local processing, local gfx elements, cached local data, richer GUI etc. But they have real disadvantages too - they have to be written for specific architectures & platforms, and consumers have to locate (and update) them through a whole different channel (an app store) than the site they communicate with (which is usually a company website).
But a NaCl (or similar) app could work just as well as a mobile app does. They have all the same advantages (fast, rich local GUI, etc), with the added advantage of being downloaded on-demand directly from the relevant website. And NaCl's disadvantages (platform-specificity and security issues) are no worse than existing native apps.
Heck, for mobile platforms (well, Android) you might as well use standard APKs as your native client, with just a streamlined installer (click a link, show a permissions dialog, then auto d/l+install+start), and bypass the app stores altogether. Next time you click that link, it takes you directly to that respective app (as with Maps and YouTube links), which then displays the content you wanted.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
.. this is the classic lack of information / total opinion piece spewed out by infoworld which gives me hives. Infoworld is perhaps the WORST long running tech news website in existence. As evidenced by it's spamming /. with articles. Neil Mcallister sees everything through Java goggles and has the insight of a wet piece of 3 day old fish.
Seriously difficult to believe that /. readers could be discussing this drivel. What's happened to this site?
Chrome has been a platform for a long time ... where have you been?
Web platforms have been tried before since the 90s--see Java applets and ActiveX--and the experience is always poor
I think that result is actually countering what you are saying. Both Java applets and ActiveX provide (more or less) NATIVE experiences that are merely activated by the web container they are in.
Now it's true that Java applets did not feel native, but ActiveX sure did.
That said, I feel like your conclusion is correct - off and on we have tried pure web solutions, or rather wrapped web solutions, and they were eventually discarded. You simply are better off having a fully native application over a web-wrapping of any kind.
Now that's not to say there will not be a healthy number of web-wrapped applications. The experience can work if you just need something simple like a form or something else. But it simply will never be able to keep up with applications tuned to the host OS they reside in for overall experience.
In short you can always have a web app that works well enough but it can always be bested by a dedicated native app.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How about Web apps calling native APIs, a la Blackberry Playbook OS?
Although that can lead to some very nice web apps, in the end the web developer is at the mercy of the browser to expose the system to them. In the end you will always be missing some corner of the OS you could use in a fully native application.
I don't think web apps are dead at all, but I do think native apps are in ascendance for a while at least.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They are both companies. Their natural goal is to make as much money as possible.
This is a horribly dangerous misconception.
The fact is that for MANY companies money is not the primary goal, once they have enough money to "coast".
Larry Ellison. Steve Jobs. Scott McNealy. Bill Gates.
These are all guys who did insane things with the companies they ran, insane at least with the expectation you'd be making money.
No, for the top players it is NOT about making money, it's about the Game. There's not even one Game, each is playing his own and wanting to "win" by whatever internal definition they have.
Until you understand this basic truth you will never understand the computer/technology market, or be able to predict anything about it - and that is VERY dangerous if you have a career that intersects it in any way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And a first-rate video and audio codec family with no patent encumbrances.
That you know of... the fact Google will not indemnify people who use it speaks volumes as to the validity of your statement.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow, to think the first comment got modded to +5, and this comment is ignored. Slashdot is going downhill these days.
Interesting article by a mozilla dev about how to keep these new features compatible across all browsers. A lot of new features have not yet been standardized, and for every feature standardized there are 5 more in the works. Not everything they used in this book are standard HTML5/CSS3 features, and yet other browsers are already being forced into implementing them.
While there is something to be said about developing features quickly, I don't know if this is a super good direction to move the web in. In essence, Google is now encouraging developers to become entirely dependent on new browser features, and by doing this, we are sacrificing compatibility in the name of shiny apps.
As another wrote the future is rich native apps that have the ability but not the mandatory requirement of web integration. This way you have the speed of native and can choose whether or not to use the cloud for syncing or backups or getting the latest data.
From where I'm sitting I can't really say I agree to that.
Sure native apps are great for some things (adding functionality to the systems/OS layer comes to mind). But for pure userland functionality like productivity and office apps you will get a better integration through a web app and as far as offline work goes pinning data to a local (possibly encrypted) cache is not new and is quite documented in the standards. One more point: unless you use a middleware language to write your app, which of it's own introduces a lot of problems, you will need to actively support two versions - if not more, seeing where mobile OS fragmentation goes - instead of one web app...
Just my 2c though
-- no sig today
H.264 doesn't indemnify against anybody but their patent pool holders either - and they want money. A lie of omission. For shame.
Wow, that was sure mature!
Wait, not really! Nor in fact, did you have any insight there and you could have saved yourself substantial embarrassment had you simply tried thinking about the situation, even a little...
You may have forgotten we are talking about the viability of WebM. You may have forgot that since h.264 has been used in practice for years now across the whole industry, patent torpedoes would already have hit.
WebM is really untested in tat regard, and in fact there is good reason to the the h.264 patent pool may strike if WebM ever gains traction.
H.264 has gone past the need for indemnification. WebM cannot gain traction without it. That is what you are missing (well that and totally forgetting mentioning h.264 was utterly irrelevant to the discussion at hand).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nobody really offers indemnification against anybody but themselves. That's the way things are - a license is just permission to use the IP you have, not a guarantee that a specific implementation won't violate somebody else's IP. This indemnification thing was a huge part of the anti-Linux FUD during the SCO case, and we all know how that turned out. Now it's a part of the defense against WebM, and I expect it to work out the same.
WebM hardware acceleration has been integrated into ARM SOC designs. It's proven in silicon and had 20 licensees already a year ago. The license terms are quite agreeable. A year from now it will probably be ubiquitous - some inexpensive webcams and videocams and phones will probably record in it by default, and there's no reason not to include it as an option in the premium webcam or recorder that also does H.264 (unless the H.264 patent pool decides to be bitchy about licensing their engine to multi-codec devices, and we all know that's going to the Justice department for monopoly regulation). And since WebM software encoding and decoding is free, it's a no-brainer to put your content in that format. It's dumb to not include it because it's free and almost all of YouTube and many other sources can use it.
No, I really think WebM isn't going to have trouble gaining traction. That was quite the point of Google buying On2 technologies in the first place. To liberate video from the clutches of MPEG and the H.264 patent pool so we could all be free to record our kids' birthday parties without the threat of being sued, to develop our own video capture devices or streaming services or conversion software in whatever way we may choose without the hindrance of somebody trying to prevent it unless they're paid, and preventing free solutions from using video. And that's just one of the reasons why I'm a big Google fan: moving pictures with audio is a technology that should be as plain as tapwater at this point in history. It's only the deliberate efforts of folks like the H.264 patent pool who have prevented it from being available to all to date, and that era is ending now. The H.264 patent pool has relented now on decoding, but on encoding they're holding the line and so will pass into history.
H.264 members like Microsoft stand to benefit if no competing solutions can record and stream video have held this progress back. That's a prevention of progress they seem to crave but can no longer achieve. So thanks Sergey and Larry! I know opening things up like this serves your commercial purposes, but they serve my personal purposes too - and you didn't have to make it this open. You're working your magic in myriad other ways like wireless spectrum and last-mile fiber Internet and I thank you for those things too!
SuperKendall, you wield this lack of indemnification like a club. You imply a threat that OEMs who deploy WebM might be sued - without specifics. Are you going to sue somebody? Who and why? Are you serving at counsel for somebody who might, or guiding lawyers who might do so as an executive? Or are you just blowing hot air, warning folks about boojums and goblins in the dark? This is exactly the type of IP terrorism I was talking about in my original post. It's counter to progress, mongering Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. It's part of why people hate prevention-of-progress companies like Microsoft and Oracle. If you've got some claim to rights against WebM, or know somebody who does - name them. Otherwise you're just full of shit, spinning tales of ghosts that aren't there. Nobody has ever made a claim against WebM that stuck and until they at least make a claim it's just vague empty threats you don't even dare come all the way out and say. It's less than nothing. Man up and make a claim if you dare.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
... LLVM bitcode is not actually architecture-independent...
This surprises me. Could you please explain why?
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Kingdom for a greasemonkey script to allow hiding /. posts which match certain regexp.
It is hilarious to see people writing web platforms are dead... on a web site. And you're flat-out stupid to write shoving the web browser into the stack for as a middle-man for no reason, when the browser is a universal zero-install runtime for many kinds of fantastic software. And some organizations do want ChromeOS instead of current desktop O.S.es, and if users who only use their laptops to go online understood the benefits it offers, many of them would want ChromeOS too.
I agree Dart and NaCl are divisive distractions, but so are iOS and Android apps that add no value over a well-written web site or web app. Meanwhile Google is not alone trying to extend web technologies to do more; Boot 2 Gecko, Tizen, WebOS are all adding new web APIs, while the next-generations of traditional toolkits like Gnome Shell, QML, even Windows 8 are all racing to embrace Web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Standardization efforts like W3C, DAP and WAC lag behind, but it's still a hell of a lot easier to adapt a single web app to various APIs than to write native apps for each platform from scratch.
The open Web competes with other technologies, but it's also growing to encompass more functionality. Google's both working for and against it.
=S
Am I the only one to find it amusing that the field guide for Web applications is itself
- ugly,
- impossible to print to read it offline,
- hard to use and unintuitive (it took me one minute to find how to go to the next page, and even once you know how to do, it's harder than just clicking on a link)?
If this is an example of a great webapp, I'll stick to my way of designing them, thank you.
For a given query:
- the technology which brings the most relevant web page, from the whole web
and
- the technology which brings the most relevant ad from all advertisers
are basically the same.
They *ARE* a search company. They just apply the search technology on web pages to attract users and on ads to get the money.
Same technology, applied on 2 different targets, for 2 different steps in the process of getting money.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Add it up: Google Chrome will be no more a web platform than any other browser.
That means FireFox (which can already run several Chrome web-apps/browser games) and probably Opera.
But probably not Internet Explorer, at least not until they realise they've been left out and need to quickly add support for what everyone else is doing, even if it means more portability and less vendor lock-in.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I find site about apple iTV on rus.
and I have display problems with google analytics go figure http://lenny.com/
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
Sadly I can't offer a kingdom for I haven't got one.
But I'll pitch a crate of Hertog Jan in. Dunno if I can send bottles of pressurised liquids to all countries.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I stopped reading when you said: "Web platforms have been tried before since the 90s--see Java applets and ActiveX".
Native apps are a better experience? Yes, for now. But those apps on Android are written in Java. You guys were telling us Java was dead from almost the beginning, laughing at Scott McNealy's naivety of the "run anywhere" platform. Scott was right, it just took smart phones to bring it to realization. (No offense GetJar, love ya, but feature phone java can't be called "success" imho.)
I think you are underestimating HTML5, not to mention the standards that we will see coming over the next 5-10 years. A "native" app could end up being HTML5 wrapped in browser code.
I8-D
This interface with it's point and click and wait shit is terrible. Breaking away from it is just the thing to do but you have to have enough power to bring people along or you don't get the network effects and Google has that power.
In all seriousness, the web sucks as a UI. I shouldn't need to even defend that statement.
Until you posted this I'd never actually noticed that my account is also on the list. My crime appears to be making two comments (1 2) at the beginning of January calling out someone obviously posting from multiple accounts. I have a feeling this "list" is going to grow and grow...
You mean to tell me that the largest online advertising company in the world bought the next biggest online advertising company in the world many years ago? Scandalous... Yawn... 4 year old news.
I8-D
I'm just about to give up on Chrome. It used to be stable and fast, and every recent update has made it slower and less stable. I could care less about making it a "platform" - give me a simple, fast, stable browser. *PLEASE!*
You need money to play any game,
But not more money than it takes.
As I siad, this is all what happens when a company has "enough" money. All of the companies the leaders I mentioned controlled, had "enough" money to do whatever they wanted. So chasing after money was not a primary concern.
BTW, even if the CEO's priority is not the money, the shareholders (and most of the workforce) usually think different.
In case you had not noticed (and you have not) the CEO can talk shareholders into anything if they really want to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Great work!
SuperKendall, you wield this lack of indemnification like a club.
No I don't. It's just one small aspect of what Google needs to do to gain widespread adoption.
I mentioned the others (like widespread hardware support). Sure there are a few small efforts but it's going nowhere fast.
The fact is h.264 is well entrenched now and Google's efforts along these lines are futile, because there is not enough gain and some non-trivial amount of danger for anyone using it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That Field Guide To Web Applications site is a damn good example of why "Web Applications" suck, and why they not only miss the point of the web, they undermine and sabotage it.
When I go to a site containing documentation, I want to read documentation. I want to be able to read, scroll back and forth, search for text, save or copy-paste bits of text. I don't want more than half of the window wasted on blank space and a pretty picture of a book, and I want to be able to resize the window and/or font size to suit MY current requirements.
I don't want to *play* with some simulation of a book. It's a pretty gimmick that not only adds no value, it detracts from the content.
Worse it destroys the boundary between code and data (one of the strengths of the web) by forcing me to allow some random site to execute arbitrary code on MY computer just to read the contents.
I don't want to risk malware or spyware just to view a file.
I want site navigation and other control elements to have a consistent interface under the control of the browser software I've chosen to install and run, not a different interface on every web site.