If Google’s Chrome demonstrates anything it is that HTML ( and etc. ) implementation is a slipshod mess of hacks and half measures. Testing a cross platform web page is like negotiating with the three stooges… and that’s only half the problem.
Standards are a good thing, but fear the primacy of the UNIX prompt. The standard bearers are not designers, artists, or creative professionals. It’s not that Google or Facebook have achieved high form — it’s that everyone else is awful. Part of this sad state of affairs is due to the poverty of the toolset. Will Chrome deliver us ?
My hope is that Chrome not only cleans up this mess, but is the beginning of a bolder, more radical direction. One that will cultivate the kind of user experience we’ve been promised for over a decade. Boosters of the semantic web may predict overturning a thousand years of privileging text over image. For the short term, being able to reliably center an image would be a good start. Subsequently, developers commonly resort to depreciated tags ( circa 1995 ) just to avoid headaches. As a result, much of the web’s potential remains trapped in that era.
This is why Chrome may rekindle imagination. We don’t need a new front in the browser wars. The idea that browsers need to “kill” each other ( beginning with Mozilla, the “Mosaic Killer” ) is played out. Doesn’t the next stage of the internet look beyond petty monopoly? Perhaps this sought-after “richness” requires an open, multidisciplinary platform — and utility, felt in the mind and contemplated by fingertips, is truly upon us.
Or maybe we’ll get another talking paperclip.
2 RESPONSES SO FAR.
1 m // Sep 8, 2008 at 10:28 am
Aha this prompted me to check if Cringley had posted about chrome yet (he’s posting like twice a week now all of a sudden), and he has:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080905_005415.html
interesting…
Still, I don’t see why they had to make an entire browser instead of just juicy open source (BSD) libs for other browsers to use,
m
2 Paul Johnson // Sep 9, 2008 at 11:05 am
Regarding Cringley’s take:
Sticking your fingers in Google’s eyes is not like steamrolling a startup. A very public demonstration like blocking Google’s ads is blatantly anti-competitive. Microsoft has battled anti-trust allegations for far less aggressive tactics. Given this precedent, if they actually did something like Cringley suggests, it would be the end of Microsoft (as we know it), not Google.
More importantly, there simply is no need for them to use such desperate measures. It is true that the browser is Google’s bottleneck, but having their ads blocked by Microsoft is not a realistic threat. Microsoft simply dragging their feet and introducing hostile standards is all they need to do to damage Google. Chrome, in my opinion, is responding to that (already underway) evolution of ie.
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