Google: Of the Web, for the Web

Something struck me in reading this section of Stephen Wildstrom's excellent review of Google's Chrome browser. That something? Google really is a different beast than Microsoft, or even Mozilla:

Both Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (recently made available for public download) and Mozilla's Firefox 3 offer admirable security and stability improvements. But they still focus on features designed as add-ons to Web pages...These touches can be helpful, but they reflect an outdated idea of what a browser is all about.

Google has taken a different tack. It didn't expend much effort on what traditionally has been the heart of a browser, the rendering engine, which creates viewable pages from the text, images, and instructions supplied by Web servers. Google just adapted the open-source WebKit browser engine used by Safari.

Google took "a different tack" because it has no investment in the old "tack." It was born on the Web and only need worry about the Web. Sure, it intersects with the desktop, but only long enough to nudge people back to the Web.

Microsoft is in a position of strength and weakness due to its investment in the desktop. Even Mozilla, much as I respect its team and love its Firefox browser, was born in an offline world to help take people online. It doesn't yet have Google's mentality of being born on the Web, needing only to feed the Web and its opportunities. "Web" may well be a Shibboleth that Microsoft mimes but can't really understand.

Is the Web strong enough to take on the desktop's workloads? If you're inclined to say "No," I invite you to stroll over to 280Slides, an amazingly powerful, Web-based PowerPoint alternative. Use it for a day, and then let me know what you think. The Web has become pretty darn powerful.

[The_Decider]

What a lot of jibberish about "being born".

No matter how many features a web application might have, the fact that it takes control of data away from its creator and owner is the reason this online mainframe crap is niche at best.

[csUser]

Doesn't take control away from the owner and creator. Just does the processing on a central server. Wow you are retarded.

[The_Decider]

Your data is held by another company and is inaccessible if your Internet access goes down(how many thousands of dollars would that cost) or if some other glitch happens.

Yes, storing it in your own network can have these same problems, but at least you can fix them. With online mainframes your bottom line is at the mercy of a third party.

Speaking of retarded.

[mrfunnyjokes]

I am so worried about letting go of control that I print out my emails and walk them to their intended recipients. It's just good policy.
That said it's still a bit disconcerting to think of all your work just floating around "out there". I haven't explored Google Docs much, can you back up your work to your own hard drive, flash drive whatever?

[The_Decider]

Yes you can save them, but Google never loses it because they use it to profit off of you.

A company would have to be brain dead to allow its employees to use GoogleDocs for business.

[softwaredesignengineer]

People who think that the desktop will be irrelavent or that the web will take over the role of desktop software have no clue about the complexities of software development. Do they realize that the majority of web users in the world, even in the largest growing economies do not have fast internet connections?

The web is still going to be a <i>medium</i>. Not a platform or "an operating system" as some foolishly have predicted.

The cloud concept, for security reasons, won't take a foot hold at the enterprise level. It will be only primarily by internet media companies who want to archive old data that is rarely used or cannot afford their own personal storage systems and data centers.

[The_Decider]

Hammer, meet nail.

[gtyron]

I really don't thing web based computing is as great as Google tries to make it seem. Google is trying to put our desktops on the web because thats their domain and they have a lot of influence and investment their. Web applications work, but their not better. Google docs is a piece of crap, its only advantage is that it stores your documents on Google's servers so you can access them anywhere. With slight modifications you could do the same thing with traditional office suites. Google made Google Docs and other web apps so we would become tied to Google, and if we're using Google This and Google That, switching away from Google search gets a little harder and unreasonable. I hate Microsoft and love Google as much as the next guy, but web apps are stupid, and regardless of Google don't be evil slogan, they want to control computing, and they don't mind doing things that aren't in our best interest. Web apps will never get the performance regular applications do because the are run within the browser, I don't care how fast Google says Chrome is. And with that comes Google's ability to force us to upgrade our applications. 90% of all companies want to keep using the old Docs, too bad, choice is out of your hands.

[jackdaniels08]

gtyron, if only you could see the future. We are still barely at the fetal development stage. What you see now is barely scratching the surface. Come back and tell us that in 5 to 10 years. The web will be the hub of everything.

[jackdaniels08]

Fight the technology trend all you want. Roll with the steam roller machine or it will roll over you. Advanced web browsers are becoming more powerful, admit it and they WILL become the new OS and Desktop OS will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs. You stubborn backwards thinking old-timers are the same type of breed of mind that thought that PCs were a joke and would never overtake mainframe industry. Once again your stubborn minds will prove you wrong. We are going back to 'the mainframe' but this time it will be a much bigger mainframe and a future you can hardly imagine. This whole time you just didn't realize that the web and the servers that juggle and run and create data and store them in humongous data centers. Wake up already! Hello NEW World!

[gtyron]

Anytime a big company that took off in previous decades says their new thing is the future, you know that thing is not the future. The PC is beautiful because it is YOUR platform to do whatever you want with. The performance penalties of Java and .Net are too great in my opinion, I refuse to move to Javascript. Every time we "progress" we gain portability at the cost of performance. Java uses 7 times as much memory as C++, .Net uses 5 times as much. With .Net we don't even gain portability, even Java has portability issues that C++ doesn't have. Instead of just porting a compiler to a new architecture you have to port the run time environment, and in the case of .Net, recreate. Sure managed runtimes have advantages sometimes, but for the most part write your applications in native code, to run locally on your users machine. Web apps are good in moderation, but they just can't compare to local applications. Developers, please, write your programs the right way, or don't write them at all.

[softwaredesignengineer]

>>Advanced web browsers are becoming more powerful, admit it and they WILL become the new OS and Desktop OS will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs.

This is an example of how foolish these web kids are. A web browser is JUST AN APPLICATION. It is NOT an OS. Get the basics straight first. Kindly explain the technical details of how your imaginary browser OS is going to be the intermediary between hardware and software.

Kindly go to a book store and buy a nice book that sounds something like "fundamentals of computer science".

[JasonPCallahan]

The article references 280slides.com, but the link is broken. I assume the correct link is http://www.280slides.com

[Matt Asay]

Fixed. Thanks. I neglected the "http://" the first go round.

[richard96816]

Google's web toys may be wonderful on the surface. Security concerns will doom them from the start.

I don't know of a single business that can afford to take a chance on them for anything important.

Is Google going to guarantee the safety of your data? Not likely. I'm already seeing organizations rewriting security policies to specifically disallow use of these services.

[crusadex]

I tend to disagree with people who don't think a web OS is coming.Yes there are security concenrs,but there are with desktops.The more people are able to just log into their desktop the more the will.MS knows it,look at Live.Google knows it too.

[GlennAllen]

The "power" of the web is either limited or enhanced by the speed of your Internet connection (and any bandwidth caps you may have to deal with). Living, working, and/or playing in "the clouds" may be fun and/or useful--even essential sometimes, but as long as one's personal computer resides in the physical world there will still be more than sufficient usefulness with having no Internet connectivity at all. That's why personal computers were developed in the first place: to be personal and establish/maintain local control. Horse, meet cart.