With the release of Mozilla's newest boy Ubiquity, Microsoft's Beta 2 incarnation of Internet Explorer 8 last week, and today's announcement of Google Chrome; a lot of talks will sparkle in the cloud wondering what will be the role of the web in the years to come, how standards will play a role in it and what strategy, if any, will the browsers have along these lines... here is my view:
Clean, Simple, Efficient...
These are the three tenets that Google Chrome is going after with the design of their own User Experience. They are not reinventing the browser, they are empowering and fine tuning it for the most demanding usage that we, as of today, give the browser at hand.
Google is going for the ubiquitous Webkit as their rendering engine - the same one that powers Apple's Safari, the iPhone and the upcoming, Android's Web Browser - and for Java Script their own V8 - a home grown open source JavaScript Virtual Machine that is tuned for applications, not just Web sites.
And even though Microsoft is late at joining the party of Standards, they for sure are welcomed at providing the world with their initiative of embracing standards once and for all, on IE8.
This change of focus should provide the development teams with the opportunity to focus their energies elsewhere... like creating content, enabling rich visualizations... embracing the continuum experience of what they are building... and most important, making their services accessible to everyone, thru everything and everywhere.
It's all about the semantics
We should be building once, making the information semantically available for anyone to access it, and then letting the world focus on creating new ways for interacting with our services. Be the king of your domains and let others in for expanding.
This sure might not be the scenario for every shop out there, but it is true for both Internet and intranets service and data providers.
Today the web is about enabling connected experiences, today we developers expect every service to come with a companion API, so we can either extend our own services with theirs, or extend theirs with something else from our toolkit. We want that interoperability build in from day 1.
We are enabling the semantics of the Web with our services, and here is where features like IE8 Accelerators and Web Slices, and the latest Mozilla's Ubiquity are setting the basics for such a reality to be ubiquitous to us.
The future... our history
After all there is one true on all this, the Web is turning to where it should have been years ago: it's turning towards Standards, or better said, the lowest common denominator is been raised towards more common fields; and as a direct result the web is becoming more of a commodity - like gas and electricity - and is disconnecting from proprietary pipes that minimize its growth.
The Web will be a basic foundation where we all can come and play regardless of our origins and destinations, Browsers will now move along providing contextual functionality to the cloud, extending and building around web services, shortening the gap between today's reality and a future of semantic mash-ups build upon our digital necessities.
The future... our history, will be remembered by the renascence of the collaboration of services and a always-on presence of our memories, information, stories... the digital draw of ourselves.
Welcome Web 3.0!
P.S. have you checked out Adaptive Path / Mozilla's view of the future of Web?
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