Another TechCrunch Guest Post on Single-Site Browsers

My first guest post for TechCrunch, on the subject of single-site browsers, attracted a lot of interest and no small number of questions. Without seeing them in action, it’s pretty hard to grasp what’s so great about what sounds like a stripped down, less functional version of a normal web browser. I’ve followed up with [...]

AIR, Flex and the Open Web

With the official release yesterday of Adobe AIR and Flex 3, it’s worth taking another look at the question of what these products mean for the evolution of the web. Criticism of Adobe for the proprietary nature of its technology is hardly novel. A widely read piece by Ted Leung calling Adobe the “Microsoft of [...]

AIR, Flash and Self-Fulfilling Prophesies

Yesterday I mentioned in passing my bet with Mike Shaver that Adobe will deliver AIR as part of a new Flash version at some point during the year. So naturally I speed-dialed my accountant when I saw the following on Ajaxian this morning: The biggest advantage that AIR has, though, is Flash Player 9’s near [...]

The Runtime Wars (Aka XULRunner's Exaggerated Demise)

“I keep telling people that Firefox is just a measly stub built on XULRunner, but they don’t believe me. They claim that Mozilla stopped supporting XULRunner and I’m telling lies.” This comment was made to me by Benjamin Smedberg, who is the driving force behind XULRunner, Mozilla’s platform for building portable, web-enabled applications. Obviously the [...]

Browser Trends: Site-Specific Browsers

One thing that clearly differentiates web apps from their desktop counterparts is that the former run inside a tab or page in the web browser rather than in their own process. This has a number of drawbacks, several of which are elegantly set forth in the blog post announcing the launch of Mozilla Prism: Personal [...]

Browser Trends: Offline Storage

I’ll start my exploration of the future of web browser technology by discussing some key trends that will come to the fore in 2008. The first is the addition of local storage capabilities to web browsers. This is an area that kicked into high gear last year with Mozilla’s work on offline apps, Google Gears [...]