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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.'"
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Or is there any other way this can be interpreted?
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.
You know what is ironic?
IE 9 and 10 are fully open standards compliant with XAML the only semi proprietary thing in it for Metro hooks. Oddly I am considering going to IE 10 when it comes out because it is the the most standards compliant, secure, and best browser and I am afraid to get locked into an eco system.
I feel I just walked into the twilight for even saying this! But I feel it is exactly 10 years ago all over again with IE 6 and that fear of the web being closed off. Those were some dark days.
Companies like Apple have proved that once they are in a dominate position can quickly turn into the bad guys. 10 years ago I never would have imagined Apple doing anything as crazy as they are today. Google just might pull it off as IE and FF usage is declining.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
Google has proprietary CSS and Javascript as "enchancements". Yes webkit is open source but the CSS 3 implementations are not w3c standards. THey propose replacing HTTP with SPDY and already violate RFC implementations of http that can flood routers that are not configured properly in order to make it appear faster. Now everyone is doing it.
To me Chrome feels a lot like IE 5 or 5.5 where cool AJAX was introduced and IE at the time was a great browser that was faster and sleeker. However, proprietarness crept in at those releases just like it is with Chrome.
IE did its work in the corporate market with tie in. Chrome is doing it in the consumer market. Oddly, IE 10 is one of the most standards compliant browsers that is being developed. It is the total opposite of 10 years ago but Chrome will be stuck with many webmasters a decade from now who will wine like they do today with supporting IE 6.
http://saveie6.com/