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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 would be installing an operating system written by DoubleClick exactly. Look up who their parent company is.
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.
How can this be +5 insightful with less than 10 comments on the entire post? It turns out that if you do a search for the phrase "a multi-billion dollar web advertising company with a history of privacy violations", you'll discover this is just spam propped up by puppet accounts. Slashdot, you need to clean house.
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.
You do realize that modders can't comment, don't you? There are many who prefer to mod over chirping in with a pointless comment.
But in that case at least wait until there are enough comments to mod.
"Google has offered Native Client and Dart to compete performance-wise, but those are non-standard, Google-specific technologies..."
The conditions surrounding the use of these technologies are no different then SPDY, which is being adopted by Amazon and Mozilla, and is on its way to becoming standardized.
Comparing these to MS's contributions to the Internet (e.g. ActiveX and MSIE) is not appropriate - Google's technologies' are open for adoption by anyone and they have the habit of improving the Internet, not subverting it.
One is enough to mod.
You are supposed to mod a comment based on its content, not score them on a curve like in grade school.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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
if you do a search for the phrase "a multi-billion dollar web advertising company with a history of privacy violations", you'll discover ...
the part of my brain that contains my sense of irony just melted...
First of all, this was submitted by someone from Infoworld, and the article is on Infoworld, so nice spam.
Infoworld is routinely fed "press hits" by public relations firms looking to advance the interests of paying clients. Like most trade rags, Infoworld is a tool for spreading marketing hype and PR bullshit. The engineers amongst us usually see through these "technical articles". However, the IT managers, whom trade rags target with flatery, sadly often do not. It's because of Infoworld and others like them that we engineers have to waste time defending mature, proven and well defined technologies against marketing bullshit and unicorn farts like "cloud computing". The PR firms and their hack writers, who actually know nothing about what they're writing, make our jobs as engineers harder and we hate them for it.
The "privacy violations" stuff is mostly just Microsoft plant stories to smear Google. Microsoft's best buddy, Facebook, is 100 times worse when it comes to real privacy violations. Google may know that one thousand people left your website to go to Amazon; but google does not know who those people are. Huge difference between that Facebook. Facebook knows exactly who you are.
The story is grossly misleading. Anything that Google is doing with Chrome, can also be done with any other web browser. Dart is open source and compiles to javascript, HTML5, etc. can by used by any browser.
Since nothing that Google is doing is proprietary, what's the great panic?
Now compare that to Microsoft with Silverlight, and OOXML.
True moding is when you mod a post up you do not agree with, but is well written, gives an alternate view, or otherwise add to the discussion. That's moding integrity, I suppose very few slashdot moders do this, more should.