…trying to advance the state of the art with an open-source project called Gears.
Gears' flagship feature is offline access to web applications such as Google's web-based word processor, but it's also used to improve search at MySpace and speed blog posting with WordPress. Gears features that Google is considering for the future include desktop notifications to make web apps more interactive, geo-location processing to let web apps take advantage of where a web user is located, and support for webcams and microphones.
Gears, which like Flash and Sliverlight must be manually installed, hasn't spread widely. But adoption by some big services could help encourage people to install it, which might in turn encourage website operators to support it.
Google's Gmail could be the service to trigger widespread Gears adoption.
"We expect Gears to be widely adopted in products like Gmail," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, and there are signs that Gears-enhanced Gmail might arrive soon.
Meanwhile, Yahoo has its own browser-extension technology: BrowserPlus. It's limited to a few Yahoo demo applications at the moment, such as a more elaborate web-based tool to upload images to the Flickr photo-sharing site.
Henrikson is intrigued by BrowserPlus and said Zimbra has been experimenting with it. It "bridges the gap" between web applications and the abilities of a local computer, he said, letting programmers "access the file system, make system calls into the computer, drag and drop, access the webcam".
A thorny question, however, is whether Gears and BrowserPlus really are in the same camp as HTML and JavaScript. BrowserPlus, at least for now, is proprietary, and Gears is certainly no standard. Both must be downloaded and installed, just like Flash or Silverlight plug-ins.
Google sees Gears as an HTML ally. "Gears can be ahead of the curve, trying out new ideas that eventually become a new standard," Gears engineer Aaron Boodman said. And when new standards duplicate Gears features, Google "will reimplement in Gears", Pichai said.
Flash and bang
Flash and its new rival Silverlight offer some compelling advantages, such as audio- and video-streaming support, that make them indispensable for some web applications.
Photo-editing shows off what Flash can do, for example. Start-up Picnik uses Flash to that end, and Adobe has an online rival called Photoshop Express. Neither come close to the full features of Photoshop Creative Suite 3, but both are impressive displays of serious editing abilities.
"Nothing really comes close to the kind of desktop experience we have in Picnik," said chief technical officer Darrin Massena, adding that the situation won't change for a long time, until HTML standards such Canvas or SVG arrive.
Even if those features do become HTML standards, "it'll take an incredibly long time to see it implemented across browsers and a long time to see a high level of compatibility, where you can really rely on it without a huge productivity drain on developers", Massena said.
Improvements are not being made exclusively to HTML. Flash and Silverlight are moving targets too.
"With Adobe's revision of Flash player, version 10, they've done a remarkable job of knocking out key things. We had a conversation a year and a half [ago] where we gave them a wish list. They have been really responsive," Massena said.
Features in Flash Player 10, currently in beta version 2, include 3D graphics, special effects, and better video streaming, hardware-accelerated graphics and text control.
Although Silverlight isn't good enough for Picnik to "think about switching horses", the progress from version 1 to the current beta of Silverlight 2 has been impressive: "If they take a similar-sized leap in short order — say a year's time frame — they could be in the game," Massena said. "If they are the first to nail 3D, that could give developers a lot of reasons to use their technologies."
That's exactly what Becker promised. "We're going to be iterating pretty quickly, and each version is going to add new features and functionality," Becker said. The final version of Silverlight 2 will be released later this year, added Brian Goldfarb, group product manager for developer platforms at Microsoft.
A key part of Microsoft's Silverlight sales pitch is programmer productivity. It's based on the same C# and VB.Net languages used in Microsoft's .Net programming technology, so a lot of coders already have a big head start, and Microsoft's highly regarded programming tools can be used.
Flash, too, has rich programming tools, not to mention some tight links with tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator that are useful for application design. Since internet users update their Flash software to the latest version relatively swiftly, it's a much more stable and consistent programming foundation.
It is clear that no single technology will dominate in the near future at least — each camp's advocates acknowledge their rivals' advantages. Some see the situation not as chaos but as innovation at its best.
"The web platform is getting richer and richer," Boodman said. "I think we're living in one of the most active periods of web development right now."
