Tag: web

On the battles of the software industry

Here is a quote from Scott Rosenberg’s insightful post, titled “Clash of titanic business-press cliches”  (emphasis is mine):

Are Microsoft and Google in conflict? Of course. They have fundamentally different visions of where computing’s headed — visions that the Times article, by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft, ably lays out. But it’s not as if they are feudal fiefdoms fighting over some fixed patch of ground. Their conflict will play out as each company builds its next generation of software and services, and the next one after that, and people make choices about what to buy and what to use.

Those choices are the key to the outcome. In a battle, civilians are mostly bystanders or casualties. In the software business, civilians — users — determine who wins.

2008 will be the year of the web worker because …

Web Worker Daily has published the results and some of the submissions for their “2008 will be the year of the web worker because …” contest.  It’s an interesting read.

To some, those postings could sound like a bunch of nonsense from a few lunatics.  And to be honest with you, that’s not far from the truth right now.  But this is not the first time we’ve been there.  Today’s web workers include  many technical people, who already saw the “this is nonsense” and “it will never happen” attitudes before, when Open Source Software was as much of a dream as free wireless access to the Internet, when Microsoft was an unshaken monopoly, when nobody could put “Linux” and “desktop” in the same sentence, when “web standards” were supported only by their unknown authors, when Altavista was thought to be the best search engine, when … You get the idea.

2008 will be the year of the web worker because web workers believe it will be so.

The state of browser affairs

First, a little joke to set the scene (forgive a rough translation from Russian)…

Lion, the king of all animals, was running some statistics over his animal kingdom.  He called all animals and made the speech.  “Dear all,” – he said, – “I am trying to figure out how to direct the educational program in the upcoming year.  For that I need some stats.  Those of you who are strong, please stand on my right.  Those of you who are smart, please stand on my left.  And let me count you…”

Strong animals – elephants, bulls, hippos, etc – all moved by the lion’s right paw.  The smart animals – beavers, rats, foxes, etc – grouped by lion’s left side.  When the dust settled, there was a one animal still running around blubbering something.  All attention turned towards the creature, and everyone saw the monkey.  It was running back and forward from one group to another and back again, thinking out oud: “strong to the right, smart to the left.. .strong to the right, smart to the left… and me? what about me?  Do I have to cut myself in half or what?” …

For the last few days, I feel a little bit like that monkey.  The thing is that I’m using two browsers right now, I can’t continue using two browsers, and I can’t pick one.  Those of you following me on Twitter might be somewhat aware of the situation.

I love Firefox.  I’ve been using it for years, and I don’t see it going anywhere.  It has plenty of functionality (especially through plugins and extensions) that no other browser has.  It does whatever I want it to do and then a little bit more.  But it’s so slow that I can’t stand it.  I have removed all extensions that I don’t use.  I have disabled all extensions that I use from time to time.  I read all optimizations tips on the web and tried a few thoughts of my own.  It helped, but not enough.  Nothing has solved the problem.  Scrolling is still slow.  Especially with a few tabs open.  Switching between tabs is slow. Opening a new tab is slow.  And these are things I do a few thousand times a day.  Even milliseconds count for this operations.  Firefox allows itself to spend almost full seconds.

On the other hand, I have Opera – a fantastically fast browser.  It even has a lot of features that make browsing the web so pleasant. Tabs, search bar, downloads management, history and bookmarks, fast dial, notes, and many more.  But.  Those aren’t enough.  Even with recently introduced widgets it still doesn’t cover the functionality that I need.  By far.  Not even 50%.  But it’s so fast that it almost makes me not care.  Almost.

Opera has practically no integration with social services – something that I work a lot with.  No comparison can be made with Firefox extensions for Twitter, Flickr, and del.icio.us here.  It has practically no integration with other, less social, online tools – specifically the Google pack of services (Gmail, Calendar, Reader, etc).  And it misses the most important area of my work – web development.  Source code formatting, highlighting, editing, analysis, testing, troubleshooting…

I am confident that the situation will improve and resolve itself pretty soon.  Firefox is getting a lot of momentum and already plenty of optimizations went into upcoming Firefox 3.  Opera is getting a lot of hype and user base on mobile devices.  People are starting to develop for it.

But I can’t wait…

Waiting for an online advertising revolution

Quoting Stan Schroeder of Mashable:

The thing is, AdSense is just too easy to abuse. Click an ad, and there goes a couple of dollars. Turn it into a meme or a viral joke and thousands go down the drain, together with the entire idea of click-based ads.

I agree,  the system is easy to abuse and it is getting abused a lot.  But it still works.  It helps a lot of people make a lot of money. And until it is so, it won’t go or even change much.

Now the question is – what are the alternatives?

TinyURL coincidence

Yesterday I read the Slashdot post discussing the power of TinyUrl web service to affect accessibility of web resources.  Most of today, the TinyURL web service is down. (Switching to conspiracy voice):  Coincidence?  I think not!