Since there’s yet another round of speculation about Google’s plans to transform the universe by developing its own sorta-kinda operating system, I think it’s time for a little game of connect-the-dots.
OK, we know all about Google’s expanding universe of Web applications that now go way beyond Web search, what with Gmail, the Google Desktop Search, and the latest product to turn the geek smile, the new Google Maps.
Thanks to the patient explication of Jesse James Garrett, we now have a name for the bundle of technologies that make this generation of Web-based applications feel more usable than their predecessors: “Ajax,” an acronym referring to “Asynchronous Javascript + XML.” All you really need to know is that this stuff makes it possible for Google (as well as a few other innovators) to design Web services where stuff happens very fast on your screen without your having to wait for the browser to send a request back all the way across the Internet to a server, and for that server to send some bits back to you. With Ajax, this all happens via services that are already built into your browser, rather than insisting that you wait while Java takes its long march into your browser window — or that you open your computer up to the myriad vulnerabilities created by Microsoft’s approach to building Web applications.
So Ajax is cool, and all eyes are on it. Meanwhile, Microsoft, prodded by the success of Firefox, has woken from its slumber and announced that it will update Internet Explorer as soon as this summer. We can be reasonably certain that the new IE will provide its users with some of the key improvements that Firefox users now enjoy, like tabbed browsing, which Opera users like me have had for, like, ever. (Opera even automatically saves and restores your tabbed window sets — God, it’s good! But with the right set of plugins you can pretty well match it with Firefox, and for free.)
Opera’s CTO, Hakon Lie, along with a group called the Web Standards Project, has issued a challenge to Microsoft. Microsoft, under the slogan “embrace and extend,” has a history of adopting previously extant standards and then twisting them just enough to make everyone’s lives miserable. To this day, Web designers often have to build two versions of sites, one to serve to IE and one to serve to everyone else — or they have to make compromises in how a site is served to make sure its pages don’t break on these incompatible browsers.
Microsoft developers say this time they intend to do better. Lie and the Web Standards Project plan an “acid test” to see just how well the new IE handles some of the subtleties of newer versions of standards like CSS (the “cascading style sheets” that give designers fine-grained control over a Web page’s layout).
It seems to me there’s another acid test anyone can perform: When the new IE is out and gets automatically distributed across the Net (to the millions of Microsoft users who now have automatic updates turned on so they don’t get zonked by some viral crud), all you’ll have to do is fire it up and visit your nearest Ajax-powered site. If Gmail works, great. But if the new Microsoft browser, in order to deliver some new benefit or other, turns out to break the Ajax armatures that hold the new Web applications together, then we’ll know that the company is up to its old tricks again.
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