Web Directions

ChromeOS, another step in the direction of “the web, everywhere”

• In: Blog
• By:John
• July 10, 2009
• Leave a response

There’s prob­a­bly lit­tle to be added to the giga­bytes of responses to Google’s announce­ment a cou­ple of days back of their “ChromeOS”.

As with the Palm Pre, if not more so, as the announce­ment says “For appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers, the web is the platform”.

I said a few days ago, have done so for a long time, and will I am sure con­tinue to do so for some time to come — increas­ingly, the way we develop user expe­ri­ences, regard­less of where they will be seen, will be with web tech­nolo­gies — prin­ci­pally HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Silverlight, Flash, and sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies like JavaFX will have their place — but all of these have their challenges.

ChromeOS runs on top of Linux. There is Mono, an open source imple­men­ta­tion of Silverlight, but there is no offi­cial Microsoft imple­men­ta­tion of Silverlight for Linux, so while tra­di­tion­ally Linux has been a small player when it comes to main­stream user focussed com­put­ing, if ChromeOS is suc­cess­ful, that will change. And the lack of a first class imple­men­ta­tion of Silverlight for Linux would then be a con­sid­er­able stum­bling block to its wide­spread adoption.

Flash, while avail­able on almost all web enabled and con­nected devices, includ­ing Linux based devices, has, due to Apple’s cur­rent deci­sion mak­ing, the chal­lenge of not being avail­able on the sin­gle most widely used mobile web enabled device. the iPhone.

Will the launch of ChromeOS push Microsoft to develop a Linux ver­sion of Silverlight? When will we see Flash on the iPhone? And will the invest­ment of thou­sands of devel­op­ers in “native” iPhone apps ulti­mately be an evo­lu­tion­ary dead­end, as an increas­ingly diverse mobile web ecosys­tem means the only fea­si­ble way to build an appli­ca­tion that tar­gets Windows based net­books (sorry “low cost small note­book PCs.” ;-)) “tra­di­tional” Linux based net­books, ChromeOS base net­books, Android based net­books and phones, Nokia S60 based devices, Palm webOS based devices, iPhone and other OS X based devices, the Nintendo DS fam­ily, and so on is a tech­nol­ogy that runs on all of these devices?

Over a decade ago, there was much rejoic­ing that Java would offer us the oppor­tu­nity to “write once, run every­where” (which quickly became, as the joke would have it, “write once, debug every­where”). And that was in the days of a cou­ple of oper­at­ing sys­tems, run­ning on devices with very sim­i­lar user experiences.

I’m not sure why there isn’t a lot more excite­ment that HTML/​CSS/​JavaScript, and related web tech­nolo­gies are becom­ing in real­ity “write once, run every­where”, not just in terms of the devices they’ll run on, but also in terms of the flex­i­bil­ity they pro­vide to cre­ate appro­pri­ate user expe­ri­ences on very var­ied devices with the same core code. As a soft­ware devel­oper with well over 20 years expe­ri­ence, to me, noth­ing short of a mir­a­cle is hap­pen­ing under our noses — the fact that it has crept up on us over a decade or more is per­haps what has accus­tomed us to what should be seen as some­thing extraordinary.

In the mean­time, web devel­op­ers and design­ers, you can rest assured, your skills will be increas­ing demand — so keep them honed. We’ll be joined by many more folks over the com­ing months and years.

2 responses to “ChromeOS, another step in the direction of “the web, everywhere””:

1. • By:Richard Fink
   • July 11th, 2009
   

   “I’m not sure why there isn’t a lot more excite­ment that HTML/​CSS/​JavaScript, and related web tech­nolo­gies are becom­ing in real­ity “write once, run every­where”, not just in terms of the devices they’ll run on, but also in terms of the flex­i­bil­ity they pro­vide to cre­ate appro­pri­ate user expe­ri­ences on very var­ied devices with the same core code.“
   I’m with you on this. It’s quite amaz­ing. And any plat­form that defies this trend (I’m think­ing of cer­tain E-​​Reading plat­forms) will ulti­mately be snow­balled by those that don’t.

2. • By:john Allsopp
   • July 13th, 2009
   

   Hi Richard,

   inter­est­ingly, I know a few smart, really clued in folks in the web and mobile arena who are very pos­i­tive about the Kindle in par­tic­u­lar. I’m a very big reader, but it draws one big meh from me. I see it and eBook read­ers as busi­ness deliv­ery tech­nolo­gies — my feel­ing is that they are designed with the busi­ness inter­est of their devel­op­ers and their part­ners in mind, not as great ways to deliver a read­ing expe­ri­ence to their users. That they may also be, but it’s my sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that that’s not their rai­son d’être.

Your opinion: