O'Reilly News & Commentary

Google's Unique Position and Imperative Need for Browser Interactivity

By Timothy M. O'Brien
May 28, 2009

Google's clarion call for HTML 5 and rich interactive browser applications marks an interesting fork in the road for technologists. Will we invest our time in learning more proprietary, native APIs to create better iPhone and Adobe AIR applications, or will everything start to move toward a standards-based browser as the underlying platform for interactivity. Despite Google's influence in the market, this isn't a foregone conclusion. Just how long will it take for the content generators to adopt HTML 5? And, what's in it for Google?

Analysis 2009: Internet Explorer Fades, Firefox Stays the Course, Google Chrome Surges

By Kurt Cagle
January 7, 2009

Poor IE. Like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, it seems to have a hard time getting much respect these days. Within Microsoft it has long been the unwanted stepchild - ignored when Microsoft shifted gears towards server-side technologies in...

Getting OpenID Into the Browser

By David Recordon
December 3, 2008

Imagine if your web browser knew who you were on the web. Just as you login to your computer, what if when you fired up your browser, it said "Hello Dave" and asked you to "unlock it" as well. In doing so you become securely logged into your OpenID provider and as you move around the web your browser takes care of automatically logging you into the sites that you want to be, asking you about others, and helping you register with new ones using your OpenID. Argue as much as you want about the details in making this happen, but I think it's hard to disagree that making it easier for people to manage and use their identity (or identities) online is a bad thing.

The Future of XForms

By Philip Fennell
October 2, 2008

Some of the recent talk on the Mozilla XForms Project's mailing list (dev-tech-xforms) has been about the winding-down in effort on the Mozilla XForms plug-in. There has been praise for the efforts of those developers involved in the project, and quite rightly so. However, some people may be seeing this as a bad sign for XForms in general. Well, not so I say and the reasons for this are three-fold...

Reflecting Upon Chrome

By Kurt Cagle
September 3, 2008

Chrome represents a change in the way that Google is choosing to play the game, putting them on a far more equal footing with the other browser vendors, and asserting that, on the browser as on the server, they have arrived.

Social Networking and the Flock of Canadian Loonies

By Kurt Cagle
July 13, 2008

Flock 2.0 (http://www.flock.com) is a comparatively new browser, based upon Mozilla Firefox, that was designed from the ground up as a Social Networking "application". Designed to cover the major domains within that field - blogging, media manipulation, search, syndication and social community interaction - Flock represents a novel approach of using the browser in a dedicated fashion as both the vehicle and the gateway for devotees of social networking services.

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