Google launched Gears last May, and for the first year of its release it was considered a minor, niche product that a few developers and users may take advantage of to allow offline access to web applications. You can probably recall the arguments at the time: who needs offline access, connectivity is everywhere anyway, not enough apps will support this etc. It wasn’t until a year later and only a few weeks ago, that Google revealed its ace card: Gears-powered messaging for MySpace that is super-accelerated. Google had entered the race to provide the new web API, and for a year almost nobody had noticed. The browser of the future is likely to become the virtual machine that hosts almost all applications. In this scenario the operating system becomes transparent, so Microsoft has something to protect (the source of its profits), as does Adobe, who currently provides the most common and consistent web virtual machine with Flash. Google has made no secret of its plans to target and harm Microsoft, and they know that the best way to go about that is to make the operating system irrelevant by moving up a layer and turning the browser into a standard, but powerful, virtual machine for applications. It is hard to convey in a review how Gears can change and accelerate the functions of a web application. With browser-based Javascript, functions in MySpace such as listing and sorting emails or filtering through a list of friends felt very slow; the loading bar would freeze as the hourglass spins while your browser makes multiple requests back to the server. With a quick install of gears, a click on a confirmation box and a couple of seconds of loading time, the same functions that would previously almost drive a user insane now feel like they are part of the browser itself. What Google showed us Gears could do with the MySpace integration woke almost everybody up to the true intention of the product: this was no longer about offline browsing, but a shot aimed directly at Adobe and Microsoft. → Read More
Last week we looked at how some browsers and plug-ins were adopting storage-related API’s that are a part of the new HTML5 draft specification. While Gears, Opera and Webkit have implemented structured storage API’s, the remainder of the HTML5 spec currently remains mostly unimplemented and also in a state of flux. HTML5 is a super-sized effort to bring all the browsers under a single, standard markup language and set of API’s – but with Microsoft, Adobe and others racing ahead with their own next-gen web technologies, will we ever see a real HTML5 standard? Learning From History In terms of the scope and effort, the HTML5 effort has an earlier historical analogy in the HTML 3.0 spec. Back in April of 1995, the HTML 3.0 spec was drafted as a backwards-compatible way of adding new features (such as tables) to HTML 2.0. The W3C had only just formed, and HTML 3.0 was one of the first specs to be produced by the new working group. At the time the browser wars were just around the corner, as Navigator had been out for only five months and had already built up 80% market share. Microsoft had taken notice and were rushing out Internet Explorer 1.0 which would be released a few short months later. As it remains today, in 1995 the different browsers all supported a different set of markup. With their new 1.1 release, Netscape had raced ahead and implemented tables, floating images, and other navigational elements (such as visited links). IE 1 was a complete hack of a browser that had an approach of rendering at all cost, meaning that if it couldn’t work out what the user had intended with the HTML, it would do its best to have a guess and present anything. This resulted in issues such as being able to mix tags (eg. <b><p>Header</b></p>) which allowed developers to be lazier as IE would compensate for mistakes. With the market share of Internet Explorer steadily rising, and with frequent point releases and updates from both Netscape and Microsoft, the two browsers steadily diverged further as the market was also segmented into two firm camps. The HTML specification effort, which had previously taken the form of RFC’s, was supposed to re-unite the browsers and formalize new features that browsers had already introduced. There was often significant tension amongst contributors to the spec about which browser, Netscape or → Read More
Our sister publication Techcrunch UK noticed that a Location services API had been added to Google Gears. The developers behind Gears have been plotting out future API additions for a while, and those plans have included having Geo-data available to mobile app developers (see the spec here). We found out today that Google is backing up their Location API with a large effort to map out cell-phone towers and wifi hotspots, so that a user’s location can be pin-pointed more precisely. While some cell-phones have an internal GPS, the data is inaccurate indoors and not available on all devices. The other non-GPS method for accurate location data is to use the location of cell towers. Google can store the lat and long of a particular cell tower in their database, and when their software in the future sees that cell tower on a phone, they know exactly where the phone is. To boot-strap the database, both Google and Apple have been using a company called Skyhook, who drive around pin-pointing the location of cell towers. By using this method Google bypasses the need to have deals in place with network providers for positioning data. In addition to cell-phone towers, Google is also mapping out Wifi locations to form a large rogue base station almanac, which is used for both additional accuracy in location calculations, and also to point users to the nearest available access point. Once the database has been boot-strapped with initial data and launched to developers via an API, users of the service will further refine and improve the service by having devices submit information on towers and signal strength (along with location) back to Google. This means that over time, the service improves itself and will be able to work almost anywhere in the world, regardless of local regulations, network providers or restrictions. It is expected that the service and associated data will be made available for free to developers using Google Gears (specifically the new Windows Mobile version). For developers of mobile applications, it means that they now have a very accurate way of not only calculating a users position, but also an easy way to pinpoint other locations as a basis for a location-based service. There is also an effort to develop and define a standard API for accessing Location data and services in the browser. As with local browser storage, Google are leading the → Read More
The next-gen web is starting to gather pace, as this week MySpace integrated Google Gears, Yahoo! announced their new BrowserPlus product and Google launched a browser-based edition of their 3D Earth product. Technologies and formats such as AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX, Gears, XUL, Web Applications 1.0 (DOM5, HTML5 etc.) allow developers to accelerate beyond AJAX and towards a new generation of web applications with better performance, more functionality and tighter desktop integration. Developers and users are now presented with more web technology choice then ever before; “DLL hell” has been superseded by “plug-in hell”, as a variety of companies present their versions of what the next-gen web will look like. But on the web, such choice can come at a cost to both users and developers. More than a decade has passed since the first battle over web formats, back then it was Microsoft, Netscape, Apple, AOL and others laying different foundations in the form of browsers, scripting languages, web servers and more. The legacy of that battle is still being felt today, as Javascript developers rely on whole libraries to assist them in developing cross-browser code and CSS developers depend on a catalog of hacks so that their sites can look consistent across different browsers. With the new rich web application technologies still in the development phase, there is an opportunity to not repeat the mistakes of the past and instead take a standards-based approach. Thankfully during the course of the previous decade companies such as Microsoft became more receptive to open standards, data portability and cross-platform support. Having broad support for open standards simplifies technology for both users and developers, but it is obvious that not all of the currently announced technologies, such as those listed above, will During the course of a series of posts here on Techcrunch we will look at various elements that make up the next-gen web and evaluate the options available, current support as well as how well standards are being adopted. In light of the recent announcement from MySpace that they are using Google Gears in their application, in this first post we will evaluate browser-based local storage cache’s. Browser-based Local Storage As web applications became more popular there was a general demand for an ability to run web-based applications offline. The first such solutions that could work without requiring a browser plugin or separate application were those that relied on the caching → Read More
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