Should Apple Discontinue Safari or Double Down?

The recent news that Chrome has passed 20% browser market share (according to StatCounter) was impressive for a browser that hit the market just 30 months ago. One subtle point that was hardly mentioned in the tech press is that, as the same narrative was trotted out time and time again (Chrome surging, Firefox holding [...]

Apple Tech Support Word Cloud

My friend Cedric (who apparently has too much free time on his hands) sent me this word cloud (courtesy of Wordle) generated from the Apple support emails in my previous post:  

Apple's Award-Winning Customer Support in Action

At the beginning of November last year, I finally managed to get my hands on an iPhone 4. I’m nothing short of delighted with the phone, which addresses many of the issues that I had with my old iPhone 3G (slow performance, crappy camera, no rotation lock, etc.). When I went to update my iPhone [...]

Chrome Drops H.264: Good, Bad or Indifferent?

The announcement by Google that they will be dropping support for the H.264 video codec from their Chrome browser pivots nicely off my (fairly) recent posts about the problems with web standards. There has been much discussion in the wake of the announcement about the merits of open versus proprietary technologies. Some have accused Google [...]

The Trouble With Web Standards

Another of the trends underlying the supposed death of the web is the shift from web standards to proprietary languages for developing networked applications. This is exemplified by the iPhone app ecosystem, which is inhabited largely by apps that could be websites but have been implemented instead using Apple’s Cocoa Touch API. I touched on [...]

The Browser Platform Wars

I was chatting recently with the founder of a high-profile startup that is making strategic use of Mozilla technology. “People keep telling me that WebKit is the future,” he complained. “Have we made the wrong choice?” I did my best to reassure him of course, providing arguments that support their choice and pointing him to [...]

Can Apple Save the Publishing Industry?

I’ve read the Economist religiously for over 15 years. For many of those years I bought a copy every week at the newsstand, and I’ve subscribed for the past couple of years. A few weeks ago, I let my subscription lapse. The reason is a web service-cum-iPhone application called Instapaper. Dragging their bookmarklet into your [...]

SproutCore and Standards-Based Rich Internet Applications

It’s not often that I get to repudiate completely my most recent blog post a few days after publishing it. But anyone who is not yet convinced that the answer to the question of whether web apps are an endangered species is an emphatic “no” should run, not walk, to the excellent article about SproutCore [...]

Are Web Apps an Endangered Species?

The launch of the iPhone App Store got me thinking about the future of web apps. After all, Apple had initially announced that the SDK for the iPhone would be Safari. In other words, iPhone applications would be web apps. As a proponent of using web technologies for application development, I rejoiced. The approach is [...]

Browser Trends: Business Models

Commercial web applications must overcome a vexing business dilemma: how to make money in the face of so much free competition. This is a symptom of the VC-fueled internet economy that has prevailed since the dot com days. Venture capital firms provide companies with money based on some woolly half-baked business model but with the [...]