Slashdot Mirror
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 ----
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.
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
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.
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..."
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
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.
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"?
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