Google: The browser is the computer
Updated 12:15 p.m. PDT with additional comments from Google and Mozilla.
Corrected at 12:57 p.m. PDT: This post initially mischaracterized Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. They are all open standards browsers.
SAN FRANCISCO--Google spent Wednesday morning trying to get developers excited about the next generation of Web technologies by showing off how future Web applications will mimic desktop apps.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt kicking off Google I/O 2009 in San Francisco Wednesday.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)"It's time for us to take advantage of the amazing opportunity that is before us," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, kicking off Google I/O 2009 in San Francisco. Schmidt was referring to the growing sense that the Internet and browsers--rather than a computer's operating system--will be the future foundation for application development.
The industry isn't quite ready for that yet. Many of applications demonstrated before the crowd of around 4,000 developers will require the widespread adoption of HTML 5 technologies, which are still under development by a consortium of companies and organizations.
Still, Google's Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering, noted that the four modern open standards browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome,and Opera) are all adopting some HTML 5 technologies as they become more stable, taking every opportunity possible to ding Microsoft's Internet Explorer for lagging behind the other four browsers.
However, offstage after his keynote, Gundotra downplayed any conflict with Microsoft, noting that its task in moving toward HTML 5 is more complex because of the large number of enterprises running Internet Explorer, and the possibility that internal applications developed for that browser could break. "As they follow through, they are going to have a huge impact on moving the Web forward," he said.
Gundotra showed off how Web applications will be able to take advantage of five main HTML 5 concepts: canvas tags, video tags, geolocation, application caching and database, and Web Workers.
For example, canvas tags help developers bring all kinds of sophisticated graphics to their Web applications without having to use a plug-in--which is also the appeal of the video tag. Google showed off an "experiment" with YouTube videos coded using the video tags, which gives developers quite a few more options when it comes to how those videos can be embedded into a Web page.
Geolocation is another huge topic of late with mobile applications. Google showed off how its Google Latitude application takes advantage of a new iPhone geolocation API that Apple will release as part of the iPhone 3.0 software to run in the mobile Safari browser. Mozilla's Jay Sullivan also showed off how Firefox 3.5 will come with a button that allows the browser to pinpoint your location in Google Maps using Wi-Fi and cell tower positioning data.
In a briefing session following the keynote, Google's Matthew Papakipos, engineering director, said Google has various aspects of the HTML 5 capabilities demonstrated Wednesday in different parts of the development process. For example, the canvas tags that allow for richer graphics are present in Chrome 2.0, which is currently available, but others, such as the video tags, are farther away from reaching the world.
Mozilla plans to support all the HTML 5 technologies demonstrated Wednesday with the release of Firefox 3.5, Sullivan said. That is expected to arrive fairly soon.
One interesting question, perhaps saved for another day, concerned how, or if, Google plans to index the coming wave of Web applications as part of its search efforts. Attempting to index these rich applications at the moment presents quite a "challenge" for search bots trying to figure out how to categorize the content within an application.
"Content won't be a problem, but how do you index Gmail? Should you index Gmail?" Gundotra pondered.
Google's Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering, speaks Wednesday to the I/O crowd.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
Personally, I think that if Microsoft would have developed a robust, effective software packaging system 15 years ago, Windows wouldn't have become famous for being unmaintainable (DLL hell), and people wouldn't be so eager to jump to alternatives right now.
DLL problems are largely a thing of the past with the advent of 32-bit operating systems and .NET.
already Chrome runs each tab in it's own 'sandbox' -- which means RING3 protect key -- which means Chrome is acting as a 'hypervisor'
i don't think they are that far from a bootable Chrome that would eliminate the need for a base o/s
all I can say is: Go Google
Basically, make a facebook desktop application akin to tweetdeck that can fetch data but doesn't actually have to fetch html or javascript. Tweetdeck is a great example of this. Everything's handled by the client using the API. I would love a google desktop app. Imagine Picasa with a google image search that loads the search results right in Picasa as a gallery. Star photos, save them, add them to your web gallery without even downloading the full image to your PC (the Cloud part does the downloading to the Cloud album).
Give wikipedia a user interfacess (Oh wait, Wikipedia Explorer already exists).
If we take a few steps away from single-solution web apps (by single solution I mean the application backend will usually only be usable with the HTML/javascript frontend) and instead implement services with freely usable API. The service provider can make their own frontend (the default, maybe even just the normal web page you get right now) and then let open source or other development communities create their own frontend applications, widgets/gadgets, and toolbars.
With computing power on the user end so strong and getting strong... /why/ rely on the browser for remote computing when we can be relying on every users' PC? Cloud computing as Google sees is would be ideal about a decade ago. (Back when processing power was limited). Now most users seem to buy a dual core with 2 GB of ram straight up. Anything that won't run on that PC is pretty poorly developed, in my opinion (and web applications aren't going to be the most resource hungry applications anyway, we're not talking first-person shooters here, we're talking word processing, social networking, etc.)
I have been dreaming of that as well.
1. They run on a stable OS (non Microsoft, I spend two days fixing my WIn XP prof from System Security 4.51 Trojan).
2. The browser is smart (non IE)
3. Internet connectivity and power are reliable (something you cannot take for granted in the whole wide world), there are four hour/day power cuts in India now because of shortage of power.
You were warned at least twice, and YOU chose to install the software anyway. I'm guessing you downloaded a video codec so that you could watch porn....the most common vector for trojans.
No operating system can protect users with no common sense.
Windows is just insecure. Get over it.
If you don't mind being vulnerbale then use Windows, but in a world where the browser is the OS, who would want to use Windows? It would be expensive and insecure at the same time.
You only need an OS that can launch Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or whatever.
Google also pay publishers of web sites through Adsense. Many good web sites wouldn't exist if it weren't for Google.
With the exception of the tools needed to manage our Active Directory I haven't needed a MS product in years.
IMO, it won't be long until it will before it's "Hi, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC, and I'm the Cloud"
If the answer is yes, isn't it a bit of loosing control on my data/files? Isn't it a bit riskier? Some one may hack to the main servers, and change/delete my files?
I know these are a bit of a noob questions, but I'm just skeptic on the idea that everything is going to be in the cloud.
End users will enjoy the widespread use of cloud apps long before any enterprise would even consider the possibility. Until companies like Google, Amazon and others can offer a truly 100% secure cloud platform (pretty much a statistical impossibility), browser/cloud apps will be primarily for end users. My CTO would have a coronary if we proposed using nothing but browser based apps. The one exception would be if they were browser based on our intranet alone -- but then you get into paying large chunks of money for licensing, setup, maintenance, etc., and at that point you've already equalled or surpassed the cost of a very well run and secured infrastructure.
It all boils down to security and when you use browser based apps, you're trusting the security of your data (personal or not) to someone else. Thanks, but I'll keep my personal data stored on my desktop's local encrypted hdd.
I'm using Microsoft's Skydrive as a back up to my files, and for the possibility to open my flies on any computer using the internet (the same goes for Steam). But I'm not going to put any personal data there. Not as long as I know it is 100% safe, which may never happen.
I can see the advantages of having a browser base application, such as being able to use this application on any system. But does this mean that the OS will become obsolete? I'm guessing that some application will run better locally than through a browser. But technology always surprises us.
that said, there are issues with the whole model. It makes a lot of sense when there is a lot of data that has to be shared among a lot of people (google search, Mapquest, google earth, things like that) I think the jury is out when it comes to things where there is one person who needs access to small amounts of data (i.e. my Quicken data) Will I store that in the cloud? Why?
The other fly in the ointment is that "bandwidth" will be for the foreseeable future the most precious commodity between my home and my data. I already have a very high bandwidth connection between my disks in my house and my displays in my (Mac) PC. I don't have it between the storage and my display when it's in the cloud, AND I have to share it with my neighbors and my kids who are watching YouTube video's. The user experience of a finely designed desktop app will be far superior to anything that the web can do until you can throw unlimited computes, storage and bandwidth at the problem from the cloud. That's a long way away in my opinion.
Oh, and one more thing. Last time I looked a byte of storage, a CPU cycle and a byte of memory is still more expensive in a server than it is in a desktop. True it can be shared and leveraged, but in the end some one has to pay.
The only thing certain in this world is death and taxes.
Having data stuck on one PC is also silly for the reason that hard drive failures happen.
I actually entrust my data to the Cloud, but I do regular backups of my data.
There is a risk to everything in life.
I agree with t8 that this, in some ways, is not true. Although large companies are prominent to more attacks, they probably invest much more on safety than a private person.
I question the hype around the fact that the OSes will soon be obsolete (talking as a private user). I think that the cloud, browser based application, etc. will do a big change, but I'm not sure that they'll be able to change the convenience of having what you need on your own PC. But as I said, this is just a state of mind, and this may change once this future software will become practicably and do the same things as the OSes.
You can improve HTML all you want, but you start from a poor application container (the browser) in the first place and every year it gets worse as we cripple another functionality in the name of improved security.
Everybody keeps harping on interoperability and I agree that is a needed goal, but the issue is way smaller than just 2 years ago and meeting ACID will not eliminate the limitations imposed by the browser.
The real problem is basic interaction with the operating system. I'll give you a perfect example involving a project I worked on. The idea was for a very basic Download Manager that would retrieve a list of files for download, ask the user where to put them, and then manage the downloads. If I did this in a fat client, it would take 2 or 3 days to complete the programming, but it wouldn't even work in straight HTML/JS because of a security limitation that requires every file reference to prompt the user rather just once for the session. Flash/Flex was joined at the hip with Javascipt on this, so no go. It took a Java Applet to overcome this seemingly simple requirement and at that point the browser becomes nothing more than a transport mechanism for the JRE and requires the user to install a separate piece of code which to me is no different than just installing the app directly to the desktop in the first place.
Even Google recognizes this limitation with their NativeClient project.
Just face it. Browsers in their current form will never even come close to providing the functionality a Native Application can, much less the performance. The problem is we walk around in a state of denial and accept substandard applications and longer development times in the name of nobel, but fundamentally flawed ideal of machine independence and this will hamper adoption of the cloud because, let's be honest, Joe Sixpack doesn't care about your high ideals, he just wants to get his work done in the most efficient manner possible.
</rant>
Thanks for the suggestion.
Dell uses this approach, but it wasn't viable for our project.
First, all of our files are already compressed. Second, the individual files can be as big as 5GB and we allow up to 25 files in a single download session. I can't imagine the overhead of a large number of users (several thousand a day) compressing 125GB of data server side. We could have just TAR'ed the files (much lower overhead), but that would assume the user has the ability decompose a TAR file.
We also looked at MIME content disposition spoofing, but couldn't control it reliably (especially cross-browser) without installing something to the browser.
The point is, this should be a *very* simple thing to accomplish, but browser/JS security gets in the way. I fully understand the reasons for the security, but it really limits the browser as an application container and a new version of HTML isn't going to fix that.
Yep, you're right--if you're talking about files that big, and expecting many users, you'd bring down your servers compressing that much. Even though no (normal) people know what a TAR is, it still might be ok if you include a link to some easy-to-use tar extractor like 7zip or something.
But anyway to get back to the point, I totally agree with you that this should be easy to do even though I also understand the security reasoning. Perhaps the *next* version of HTML/JS ought to include a "levels of trust" element as a part of the standard so that a user could opt to "trust" your web site to save many files to their computer without the user's intervention for each one. This would be a great feature. Then, taking the idea further, it would be cool to be able to allow a trusted site to be able to mess about in a chosen directory, reading and writing files at will, with perhaps some kind of size quota or whatever...this would open up many interesting possibilities...we can call it SUPER COOKIES! :)
I think the time is right now because more and more people are doing things online that they once did on the desktop. The browser is doing more all the time and with HTML 5 that will only speed that up.
Internet is still relatively too slow. One top of this, all the Internet Service Providers are eagerly imposing various bandwidth caps on users, which makes any application that requires sending back and forth huge amount of data overly expensive.
I can see industry leaders fighting with the likes of comcast and verizon to keep expanding bandwidth and keep the current model or similar so customers/end users do not bear the brunt of paying the cost of an active cloud matrix.
More and more people and companies in the future who deal with cloud technology will outright demand services being offered like that in other countries without nickel and diming us to death and giving bad quality bandwidth.
These networks will enable real time streaming of DVD fr example.
This is a privacy, security and reliability drag. If your web connection goes down, oops!
But don't we also run risks? Centralizing applications under a single point of failure can cause issues. Take a look at what happened to facebook recently. As these applications get more complex, so does the chance for vulnerabilities. Can we really trust moving our applications online? And with the power of the home computer, is it really worth delegating it as nothing more than a dumb terminal? We're also putting ourselves at the mercy of the internet connection, which has slower access than a local hard drive. Where do you think the line will be drawn?
DUCK! Chairs are flying! INCOMING!
Stand back he's going to blow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Madness is occuring at Jurassic One in Redmond, WA.
GO! GO! GOOGLE!
How about the death of x86 architecture in client hardware in the handheld age? Will OS/2 run on ARM?
I like Google, but only for web-based things. What next? Terminals at our houses? The whole "let's put it on-line" crap is just that: crap. Netbooks are crap, too. It's a step backyards in computing, going back to the 1969 way of using a computers. The whole goal was to get us more and more powerful within our homes on our desk. If you don't like that concept, then stop using computers, and do what Homer Simpson did: grab a telephone and typewriter and declare yourself on the Internet!
- by winstein May 28, 2009 8:32 AM PDT
- Google itself is a web app. CNet is a web app. We never see them as apps, we just open them and use them.
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