So the browser wars are back.
Well, sort of. While the browser wars of the 1990s were waged over features, the new wars are all about platforms.
The launch of the beta version of Google Chrome last week changed everything. Its list of features is minimal, but its intention isn't: It's designed to be a simple, fast engine to run Javascript, which is the platform of choice for online applications.
So far, web applications — like those office suites that you use “in the cloud,” which reside on their maker's systems and are often referred to as Software as a Service — have resided in a curious niche in the tech world. To developers, web apps are the next big thing. But most non-tech people have little conscious understanding of web apps and what they mean to everybody, and have so far been largely ignoring them.
What it might mean for end users, however, is nice: With another Google browser plug-in called Gears, users can create an icon on their desks that will seamlessly launch a web-based application in exactly the same way that clicking on any other icon will start an application already loaded on your computer.
By launching a browser whose main purpose is to run Javascript easily and quickly, Google is hinting that the future of the Internet lies in computing “in the cloud” — at least as Google sees it. Then again, it can be argued that Chrome is being offered as the self-serving browser of choice for Google's own web applications, such as Google Docs, Gmail, Google Sites and so on.
For its part, Microsoft launched Silverlight in the spring of 2007, a kind of rich-media platform that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback, features also regarded as the future of the Internet — as Microsoft sees it. In releasing Silverlight, the software giant startled a lot of people by making it a plug-in for several browsers, including Firefox and Apple's Safari, as well as Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, a rare move for the company.
The real dark horse in this race, however, is another giant: Adobe. When Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, it focused on one main product: Flash. Not only was it a good system of playing online audio and video (without it YouTube wouldn't exist), but it was being developed by Adobe as a platform for constantly refreshed data. Using it, you would be assured that every page programmed in Flash, such as flight reservations, stock quotes and so on, would be updated automatically in the background without you having to refresh the web page. The Flash player is, after all, the most widely used application in the world, and is a familiar and reliable basis on which to revolutionize the Web.
I haven't heard much about the success of this new way of using Flash on websites, but it is, after all, mainly a tool for putting databases online, something that isn't really very sexy.
But you can see the gambling going on here. Each browser is betting that its platform will be the one that every developer wants to use for future products. And each one is right — at the time it is released, anyway.
Netscape, now dead, was the first browser to promote itself largely on its features, but it eventually fell victim to “software bloat” or “feature creep,” the tendency for manufacturers to cram as many features as they can into a product. So in 2003, a project within the Mozilla Foundation, which was then producing Netscape, created a new browser eventually named Firefox, a leaner, faster browser with fewer features. That was released in 2004, just in time to challenge Microsoft's awesome dominance.
