Linked by The Bitland Prince on Tue 9th Sep 2008 17:50 UTC
When Google released its new (and first) browser a few days ago (Chrome), many praised that move or welcomed this new player into the arena, but many others simply were a bit surprised and wondered if a new browser was really needed when this market already features IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror and a plethora of smaller ones. While IE is still leader, those who aren't satisfied with it have a good choice of alternatives, especially in Firefox and Opera. So fasten your seat belt to join me in a ride which will attempt to explain why this browser war could be a threat to Google's very foundation and why Chrome is maybe the most important move Google could have done to protect itself.
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Member since:
2006-01-28
The article is a little too wordy and its points could be summed up in a piece a third of its length. The writer is subtle but insistent on painting html as outdated, boring and not "cool", but the truth of the matter is that html is the very heart of the web.
This does not mean that the means by which we build html will not change to make easier or that html itself will not change to accommodate needed features, but by and large the web remains a library of interconnected "books" and "pages", which by design must be simple and viewable in a host of devices and platforms.
To me, proprietary technologies like Silverlight and Flash introduce more problems than they solve. First and foremost, they are proprietary, slow and their wider acceptance would turn the web into a series of private channels controlled by a very small number of companies.
HTML is far more democratic and is a format which will continue to evolve, but whose simplicity is the reason why it has done so well.
Every so many years those companies that are slowly becoming irrelevant need to remind us how important their proprietary technologies are. While a few years ago, I couldn't do most of my work exclusively on the web, today I can, and that is a testament that those who bet on a web-centric future are essentially correct.