Sunday, June 14, 2009

Jetpack + Freedom = Failure of internet

Mozilla Jetpack and Opera Freedom are not the "future" of the web. They should be known as the failure.

As of now, there isn't much information on what "Freedom" by Opera actually does..but one can only assume it works similar to their competition, Jetpack, by Mozilla. Jetpack is like the system of interacting with a browser extension from the web document you're viewing. You can adjust data in the status bar through the web interface, etc. This offers a lot of great potential, except for one thing. There are too many browsers! They're all going to tumble over each other trying to say each product is best.. and Mozilla syntax will be different than Opera's, IE, Chrome, Safari, etc.

It was bad enough when we, developers, had to manage the differences of CSS/HTML/JS through existing browsers... but if everyone is just going to make their browser extensible in different ways, that's just an even BIGGER disaster.

What we need is not more functionality... we just need you browser companies to be standards compliant and support the most recent version of things. How about instead of offering lame proprietary code in order to become "top-dog," you just start support HTML5, CSS3, and the latest versions of Javascript? We don't need your lame plugins.

This is why Flash is such a good thing. Are there problems with Flash? Yes. But why is Flash so much greater than standards when the usability is sometimes difficult? Simple, because it's universal! If I put a Flash object in IE6/FF3/Safari/Chrome or even Opera... the Flash engine renders it the way it's supposed to.

If you browser companies keep developing in your own way in different directions, eventually people are going to be pushed further and further into universal options like Flash or a platform that doesn't even NEED you. Standards has been growing with the ease and growing functionality of JS/AJAX/CSS, but this "expansion" is just chopping standards growth off at the knees.

2 comments:

  1. Oh the horror! But then again, each vendor has a different technology behind their product - Mozilla has XUL, Internet Explorer has COM add-ons, Chrome has... well some sort of extensions, Opera too relies on its own technology. It's inevitable that at the end each company will use it's own technology to 'reinvent the web'. I'm not saying I am happy about it, but unless someone gets in the game and enforces some standards, vendors will continue to adopt different technologies. As the Author points, we developers will have to deal with yet another mess. Frameworks, anyone?

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