2007 Predictions Coming True? – The Coming Browser Revolution

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, March 5, 2007 @ 5:00 am

At the beginning of the year, I made a few predictions about Ajax in 2007. In particular, I predicted that

Microsoft and Mozilla will add new features to their browsers to extend Ajax support. These features will address things like cross site scripting (making it easier and more secure), security, widgets standards support, extensions of Javascript, etc. The browser will evolve into more of an application platform than it is now.

That doesn't really seem to be happening, from what I can tell, since Firefox 4 won't be available until 2008, and Firefox 3 is making only modest changes on the Ajax front. It's too soon to say anything about IE8.

InfoWorld has a breathless article about the revolutionary changes coming in Firefox 3. A careful reading of the article, however, shows that most of the really interesting changes are planned for Firefox 4, such as support for Javascript 2.

You can read the detailed feature list for Firefox 3 here, in the form of a Google Spreadsheet. It doesn't look like either of the two features -- web services as Mime-type handlers and SQL Lite for offline storage -- are in Alpha 2, but hopefully they'll show up in the next release.

What these two new features might look like isn't exactly clear from the planning documents, but they should take their direction from section 5 of the WhatWG specification on Web Applications 1.0.

The registerProtocolHandler() method allows Web sites to register themselves as possible handlers for particular protocols. For example, an online fax service could register itself as a handler of the fax: protocol ([RFC2806]), so that if the user clicks on such a link, he is given the opportunity to use that Web site. Analogously, the registerContentHandler() method allows Web sites to register themselves as possible handlers for content in a particular MIME type. For example, the same online fax service could register itself as a handler for image/g3fax files ([RFC1494]), so that if the user has no native application capable of handling G3 Facsimile byte streams, his Web browser can instead suggest he use that site to view the image.

At the simplest level, when a particular Mime type is encountered, a web application will be launched, instead of the usual desktop application. The feature list, however, states that Firefox 3 will Support web services as MIME type handlers. That sounds a little bit different from what the WhatWG spec provides.

All Ajax-enabled web developers should take an interest in browser standards and developments. The future of their profession depends upon it.

Technorati : ajax, firefox 3, sql lite, web services, whatwg

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5. IE6: The zombie browser

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1. 

   For us at Gizmox the developers of Visual WebGui (http://www.visualwebgui.com ) it was pretty clear that there will be no real change done with in the different browsers and that is why we developed a concept that returns the control over the client application back to the server.

   While most of the AJAX frameworks throw heavy duty tasks on the browser we utilize the browser as a looking glass kind of like the mainframe concepts. This bypasses most of browser limitation by simply avoiding many tasks that the browser is not yet equipped to deal with.

   Lets face the fact that standardization has its bad sides and one of them is a very slow evolution of technologies. Imagine that the browser had a secured way to access a web service or enhanced data controls such as lists and trees.

   But that will never happen at least not in our life time… Imagine how long it would take to standardize a web service calling mechanism or enhanced data controls.. and then to get Microsoft and the rest of the world try to implement it…

   Lets face it browsers are not going to evolve any more than the already evolved… So lets return the power to the one thing that can really evolve with no standardization and long waiting… The power of the servers…

   Guy

   Comment by Guy Peled, Monday, March 5, 2007 @ 8:47 am

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