Find Me Online

HTML5 Powered with CSS3 / Styling, and Semantics

It’s Not About The Rendering Engine Anymore

Today, RIM launched their new 6.0 OS (and the new BlackBerry Torch) and by doing so, added its name to the ever growing list of products using WebKit as the basis for their Web browser. RIM’s move isn’t really all that interesting: they had no good browser anyway and it’s not as if they are first to do this.

The interesting discussion in my opinion is what Microsoft should do. Back in the Netscape / IE war, Microsoft was convinced that Web browsers would ultimately replace desktops apps (they weren’t wrong) and they invested a lot of money in creating Internet Explorer. That war is still on, although nowadays the players have changed. With IE, we’re now talking about Firefox and Chrome as the main competitors.

But what really changed however, is that the HTML/CSS rendering engine shouldn’t matter that much. We went from a 1 browser = 1 engine model to a model where we now have a couple of really good open engines powering many browsers.

Controlling the world’s browser market is one thing, but as Google is proving, that doesn’t mean you need to have your own engine. Chrome is built on top of Web kit, just like Safari is and countless mobile web browsers are. These products are still competing with each others and are still different from each other yet they are built on the same foundation.

What that means of course, is easier Web development and less browser-specific bugs. This is why I think Microsoft needs to stop developing its own engine and start using either WebKit or Gecko. Both of these are well done, support many web standards and are fairly easy to integrate in a product.

Of course, such a change can’t happen overnight and it’s a difficult thing for Microsoft to do, but I do believe that in the long term, it’d make the Web a lot better. Trident, Microsoft’s rendering engine since IE 4 isn’t exactly renowned for its spectacular support for standards. And really, I’d much rather see Microsoft invest 18 months developing Internet Explorer proper rather than waste 80% of that time coding the engine.

Tweet this August 3, 2010

Google Public DNS Servers

This blog is rapidly becoming a blog about Google. That’s not the plan, but it seems Google makes the news every week with a crazy new initiative. This week : the Google Public DNS Servers.

Of course, there are other free alternatives (other than your ISP’s servers). OpenDNS has been a popular and quite reliable one for years. Google’s initiative is interesting because, well, it’s Google and that brings a lot of interesting questions (Google has a FAQ available).

The first one for many is one of privacy. That to me, is a non issue. For one thing, regardless of what you think Google may know about you or how much they care about you personally, remember that your ISP knows (or can know) a whole lot more than any web sites out there. Anything you type, anything you visit goes through them. Using Google as a DNS server is hardly threatening in my opinion.

The second question is why. Why is Google doing this? As with Chrome, Chrome OS and SPDY, Google lately is all about speed. They want to make the Web faster and DNS queries is one of the areas where a speed improvement could be achieved and Google jumped on the idea. For one thing, Google has tens of thousands of servers world-wide and Google must pay its bandwidth as cheaply as it’s humanly possible to at this point, so they are well positioned to enter the market.

Of course, a public DNS is also interesting because it’s yet another way Google can aggregate data about us and make their ads make even more sense. That’s not a popular thing to say, but you have to think that was one of the reasons behind the move and I mean, why not? If you’re going to show me ads, might as well show me stuff that might interest me.

Those worried about privacy need not apply however. As for me, I’ll enjoy the extra speed the service has brought me so far.

Tweet this December 4, 2009