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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.'"
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/