Ever wonder where the web is going in the next couple years? have no worry, the massive behemoth of innovation, Google inc. is now in charge of defining what the web is going to be.
Todays announcement heralds the new web technology that is basically doing away with flash alltogether. Don’t believe me? Well just look at the evidence.
Google has been quietly funneling tens of millions of dollars into bringing 3d web programming and video capability to the web through the emerging HTML5 web standard, particularly through the video element and canvas tag. It’s a pretty simple business decision too. Flash is cool, i’m no hater but it absolutely stinks in terms of speed and cpu usage. It’s in Google’s best interest to develop better optimized ways to deliver high cost content to the web to make data transfer faster and cheaper. The prime difference here is just the aggregate developer quality each company employs; adobe is painfully slow and bogged down in corporate schmukness and Google is a team of 10000 undergrads and PHd’s from harvard, MIT, Standford etc etc. they just make plain good stuff like Maps, Charts, Youtube, O3d and so on…
As a computer programmer, I can only say this is a good thing. Developers make lot of money from flash programming but as a platform it is inelegant and clunky. (actionscript is one of the worst programming languages i’ve ever used) Google uses its o3d technology to bring high powered animation and rendered 3d graphics to the web using a plugin (low weight) and a high level javascript API. personally this is a great moment because it feels like a company has finally “got it”.
the premise is simple. Develop easy methods to deploy content that dont have plugins. (HTML5 canvas and video tags) Make the API use simple languages that are understandable. (Javascript, html vs actionscript). Integrate the power of the graphics chips into the browser window and give us a chance to code interactive web experiences. the result is a quick path to a ubiquitous delivery of feature rich web applications. Flash and to some extant Silverlight cannot make this claim and struggle oh so much.
We just installed o3d today and rendered some simple 3d graphics and I can tell you that we are not looking back… EVER. This is the new way of doing business on the web, its supported by the biggest, smartest company in the world and now Youtube is set up to use HTML5 and corresponding technology and will only get better over time. The only thing stopping us from making our website fully 3d is the most horrible internet explorer 7,8. The world might be a better place if Microsoft went the way of Netscape and dropped its browser to let Google take over driving web technology forward. (on a side note how does a 100 billion dollar company not build a browser that works as fast as chrome?)
We here extremely excited to use o3d and HTML5 to develop our new site and will be bringing you a new kind of experience very soon that should excite all of our clients to what the true possibilities of web development could be. (save IE users, you will be stuck on the simple text based site. sorry!)
Today we update our website progress to 2% and will report on the technical details of the technology we are developing in shortly.
Cheers
The Folks at SKRIPTfoundry
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