web applications win
In the battle for performance, I think it's the web developers who are the big winners.
Firefox is very close to shipping its major perf improvements. I expect Opera soon and a Safari 3.1 sometime pretty soon as well. Will IE 8 ship this year? I don't have a lot of confidence on that one but I'll bet by this time next year, we'll have a pretty solid next gen set of fast browsers deployed to pretty substantial number of users.
Will this be enough to keep developers focused on real Web apps, or will Flash and Silverlight plus their respective offline solutions make big gains?
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
Flash and Silverlight will prevail.
SMIL should be supported by Mozilla Firefox/Opera/Safari by default. That, along with SVG, will help Web applications.
See http://www.cwi.nl/projects/Ambulant/ for a free software implementation.
Posted by: Andrés Delfino | March 16, 2008 11:34 AM
I don't care about flash or silverlight, and I could care less about offline solutions. My life and my data is online and will be there forever.
Posted by: George | March 16, 2008 4:57 PM
Does anybody use or care about Silverlight? Except NBC after MS must have given them a bride, err, a grant to work with?
If I were a web developer, which I'm not, I'd be pissed that the most popular thing is AJAX, which is really just a hack on an old framework. Adobe Air looks best to me, but I think there's still space for a really innovative internet+desktop framework.
I haven't deployed IE7 for my company, mostly feeling sorry for developers to have to support IE6 and IE7 and a standards-based code set. But I will help spread IE8 when it comes - next to Fx of course.
Posted by: Ephilei | March 16, 2008 9:13 PM
Ephilei, speaking as a web developer, if your company is still running IE6 (and is at all likely to access sites outside your intranet), I'd much prefer that you move them to IE7. As much as IE7 still lags behind Firefox and its compatriots, it's considerably easier to build+maintain sites for IE7 and standards-based browsers than it is to maintain IE6+IE7+standards, or even just IE6+standards.
I'm really looking forward to the day when I no longer have to worry about IE6 compatibility. Even if IE8 turns out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, moving IE6 off the playing field will (IMO) be at least as big a milestone.
Posted by: Kelson | March 17, 2008 9:48 AM
I think Britney Spears will make the biggest gains... oh, wait, that's apples and oranges there, excuse me.... ;-)
(A fast logic engine is one essential element, but it is not the only essential element, in doing more work more easily on more devices.)
jd/adobe
Posted by: John Dowdell | March 17, 2008 1:49 PM