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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.'"

8 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No meat to this story by x1r8a3k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It would be installing an operating system written by DoubleClick exactly. Look up who their parent company is.

  2. Re:No meat to this story by rreyelts · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Hello - WebKit? JavaScript? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:Hello - WebKit? JavaScript? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  4. Re:No meat to this story by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  5. Apps are the past. by slasho81 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:No meat to this story by walterbyrd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:No meat to this story by Lussarn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.