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Web 2.0 Expo: Microsoft, Mozilla, Google Discuss The Future Of The Browser

I was hoping to see some real bloodshed at the Web 2.0 Expo panel with representatives from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google. But sadly, everybody was cordial and informative. The one time sparks flew was when a developer in the audience complained about how much work it is to write apps for multiple browsers, and challenged the vendors to fix that.

"The announcement of Google Chrome was greeted by me with horror," the audience member said to the panelists. Developers already were struggling to write Web apps in multiple browsers and browser versions, including Firefox 2 and 3, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8. "This is hell. What are you doing about it?" he said.

Microsoft is working on a set of interoperability tests for browsers, which it will donate to the World Wide Web consortium (W3C), said Chris Wilson, Internet Explorer platform architect. The company also built backward compatibility into Internet Explorer, so that developers who wrote Web apps that took advantage of a broken feature in an earlier version of IE don't have to scramble to change their code when a new version comes out. Microsoft also is working to unify the mobile and desktop versions of Internet Explorer.

But if browser compatibility is an issue, why don't developers just stick with Flash, which is on 95% of all desktops, asked Ben Galbraith, founder and CEO of Ajaxian, a community site for Ajax developers. Galbraith, who shared moderation duties with a colleague, tossed out a few possible reasons: Developers don't trust a single-vendor technology, they don't want to learn Flash, and they don't like it. An audience member contributed one more: Search engine optimization. Until this summer, Flash was invisible to search engines, and even now Flash is only partly searchable. Galbraith asked for a show of hands; the audience didn't seem to show any particular preference for any of these reasons for avoiding Flash.

Google plans to support browser add-ons with the Chrome browser, said Ojan Vafai, of the Chrome development team. However, the company wants to do it right; browser extensions are often a source of instability and slowdown for Firefox, Vafai said. Google said browser add-ons can be divided into two types: Extensions, which change the behavior of the browser, and Greasemonkey scripts, which change how pages are displayed. Google will support both. The author of Greasemonkey on the Chrome development team.

Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich acknowledged that extensions introduce problems, but they also improve the browser. The company is working on isolating extensions so that problems with the extensions don't create overall browser problems.

For my colleague Nick Hoover's take on the Chrome add-on discussion, and the rest of the session, read, "Web 2.0: Google Chrome To Support Add-Ons."

One audience member asked whether Microsoft plans to support Internet Explorer on the Mac, which it had done in the past but no longer does. Wilson said they don't. The audience member responded that this is a problem for him because his company runs Microsoft SharePoint, and Mac users need to access that app. Wilson said the SharePoint team should address that, and get Web applications to run on all Web platforms.

Another member of the audience asked whether the browser is replacing the operating system. The Mozilla and Google representatives said that the browser and operating system do different things. The Microsoft representative didn't respond, but I think you can guess what he might have said (in a word: No).

Desktop apps are starting to look more browserlike, Eich noted. Desktop apps have sprouted back buttons, and URLs in desktop apps send users to Web pages when single-clicked, no matter what the native convention is for clicking on the desktop operating system. "Platforms grow platforms on their backs and people use the highest level platform," Eich said.

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