Apple Ramps Up Its iPhone RIA Platform

While industry observers focus on AIR and Silverlight, efforts by Adobe and Microsoft respectively to implement their vision of a more compelling web experience, Apple is slowly slipping in through the backdoor. The other day I hypothesized that Apple’s aggressive tactics for pushing Safari on Windows users were all about plans to turn WebKit into [...]

The Social Web Browser

Despite the explosion of all things social onto the internet scene, it is becoming clear that current mechanisms for sharing information among social groups are nothing more than a stopgap measure and not an inherently satisfying solution. Users complain of Facebook fatigue and Twitter overload, as well as the unappealing privacy implications of entrusting your [...]

Is Apple Gunning for Firefox?

Update: I got a couple of comments very quickly from Mozilla people complaining that this post is rehashing old news and is needlessly inflammatory. I admit that I did hesitate to address this topic since the keynote in question was so long ago, but I felt like the issue was in the news again and [...]

Apple's Safari Push is Not About the Money

Apple has been causing a stir with its heavy-handed tactics for pushing Safari onto Windows users. Those who have iTunes, whether or not they have ever installed Safari, are apparently getting an automatic update dialog proposing to “upgrade” to the latest versions of both products. Reactions range from that of Mozilla CEO John Lilly, who [...]

The Mozilla/WebKit Arms Race

Biologists talk about a phenomenon called the evolutionary arms race. Cheetahs, for example, only survived if they were fast enough to catch the slowest gazelles. Gazelles, on the other hand, only lived to produce offspring if they could outrun the fastest predators. These are powerful evolutionary forces, and as a result both species have adapted [...]

Adobe's Quest for Web Domination

With the announcement of the first official release of AIR, all eyes have been on Adobe’s ambitions in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. But Adobe also has far-reaching plans to add new features to its Flash runtime with big implications for the web, both inside the browser and out. Content stream encryption The EFF [...]

I'm Not Sure Microsoft Gets This Open Thing

I went to download a whitepaper about one of Microsoft’s new web browser extensions and was presented with the following message: To download the file you must agree to the following license: Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) This license governs use of the accompanying software. If you use the software, you accept this license. If you [...]

Steve Jobs Says Flash Sucks

Well, actually he didn’t. When CNet initially reported on the last Apple shareholder meeting, his comments about Flash on the iPhone, buried in a list of bullet points, seemed innocent enough: Turning back to the iPhone, don’t expect support for Adobe’s Flash technology anytime soon. The full-blown PC Flash version “performs too slow to be [...]

Microsoft, Good Standards Citizen

In response to widespread outrage at their decision to make the Internet Explorer 8 handle web pages by default in the same broken way as IE7, Microsoft has now announced that they have seen the light: Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers [...]

Firefox and the Mozilla Platform

The subject of the Mozilla platform (“Gecko”) and its relevance beyond serving as the foundation of Firefox has been a subject of great debate for quite some time. The topic flared up again this weekend on one of Mozilla’s developer newsgroups. The impetus appears to have been a relatively obscure bug in the Mozilla-based Thunderbird [...]