A richer web

It is well known that the openness of the web has fostered many applications that have become indispensable to users. Indeed, most of my every day applications live in the internet cloud, so I can switch machines and operating systems painlessly. AJAX and RIA’s have managed to deliver a great user experience for applications of ever increasing complexity, but there are specialized apps that are tied to specific operating systems.

It’s a tough job for internet application developers, what with the myriad web browsers that have sometimes unique interpretations of published web standards. They have to carefully tweak their websites for each browser so they can keep their vast user base happy. This issue is fast becoming a major pain point for a lot of software developers, who have to waste time on getting their applications to work on various browsers. So what’s the solution?

Flash holds great promise, and Adobe’s donation of the ActionScript runtime to the Mozilla foundation has very exciting ramifications, one of which might be the ability to run C and Python code in the browser. But Flash is not an open platform - developers have to wait till Adobe can fix bugs and implement new features. Google tried their hand with GWT, that promised to take away the issues related to cross-browser compatibility, but in reality that too doesn’t hold up every time.

So, do we need an open runtime environment supporting a rich API that will work on all platforms and browsers and will be available in various form factors? I think yes. Adobe’s already got the Open Screen Project running, which has the mission of “enabling a consistent runtime environment across desktops and devices”. But given its slowness in opening up the Flash platform (which forms part of future milestones) and the difficulties regarding search indexing, usability etc., it may make sense to have a competing platform from a heavyweight like Google that provides a consistent, high-performance runtime environment and is community developed.

I think they might just be doing an Android for the web.