Comments on: Who Google Chrome Affects the Most: Adobe

By: shadedecho

shadedecho — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:33:52 +0000

Now *that* would be a truly amazing happening… microsoft innovating in the JS engine world! Joking aside, it seems MS's style is more to just add on to the JS core with proprietary API than to really re-do the internals… and when they do muck with the internals, we get some crappy results! However, it is clear that IE8 is coming with a big re-write of the JS engine under the hood, which is long overdue.

But honestly, I doubt MS will try to get into that game. They may surprise us, but I'd imagine they are quite a ways behind. I suspect they will try to prevent the game from being a “my JS versus your JS” kind of a game, because that's one they'll probably lose, going up against the open-source community.

By: Kyle Simpson

Kyle Simpson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:33:52 +0000

By: Gambling License

Gambling License — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:17:32 +0000

I find google chrome a very useful and fast browser as comparing to internet explorer and firefox. One thing which I have noticed on my computer is that as I use internet explorer and firefox to explore web pages my windows slow down as I open more pages but using google chrome it doesn’t happened! my windows performance increased using google's new browser CHROME I LOVE IT!

By: britg

britg — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:57:06 +0000

Haha, yes good points all around. I do agree that this is a good thing for
web developers in general because it does force Adobe to keep up with speed
and accessibility of ajax in flash.

In response to your Microsoft point - they don't necessarily have to adopt
Google's technology for V8 to have an affect on Adobe. Since MS and Google
are so competitive, I can see a scenario where Microsoft comes out with
their own new-fangled js engine that touts more and better features than V8
etc, etc. This will lead to the web tech conversation switching tone from
"ajax vs flash" to "google's js tech vs MS's js tech". This is bad for
Adobe.

I do agree with you that flash isn't going anywhere even in this scenario.
It's all up to Adobe and where they take the platform.

By: Kyle Simpson

Kyle Simpson — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 01:24:23 +0000

I'll definitely grant you that the V8 engine is impressive in some respects. But also after having tested a number of my projects (javascript, flash, etc) in it, and finding more than a couple of bugs, I still think it's got a ways to go.

But then again, even if we granted that Chrome, and Firefox, and Safari/Webkit *all* adopted this V8 engine… microsoft surely won't ever touch it. And again, for the forseeable future, content authors are not going to be able to make decisions that largely ignore (or marginalize) such a big share of the end-user community.

Will there be plenty of niche applications which target the speed and efficiency that V8 (and others) can achieve? Yeah. And will those same engines certainly speed up a lot of the other apps that are deliberately cross-browser for the mainstream? Yeah.

But that's still a far cry from saying that just because some (or even a good share) of the browsers out there *can* run javascript faster that content authors will be able to ignore microsoft's share and develop apps which run great, but only on 50% of user's machines, and on the other 50% run crappy. No, the truth is, for a long while, they'll still have to leverage technology which is consistent (albeit less performant, and certainly less “open”) for the broad audience.

I don't think V8 will reduce flash's share. What I think it *will* do is force them to keep up with improvements in performance and broad browser delivery — something they've been at for quite awhile.

And what's great is that this will be good for the overall web community. Just don't be so quick to uninstall that flash plugin yet!

By: britg

britg — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:06:19 +0000

Thanks, and yes I agree there will always be a market for rich applications that flash and silverlight will do much better. But, if chrome's technology takes off, I think adobe loses a large share of the business app business to AJAX

By: Michal

Michal — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:57:49 +0000

Hi,
very interesting point of view. Although I don't think that HTML+AJAX can compete Flash and especially Silverlight becase HTML doesn not have rich presentation capabilities and coding with DOM and JavaScript isn't very powerful compared to C#, xaml programming that Silverlight offers. HTML was just build for something else. So I definitely think that for truly rich application like ones we run on our desktop, some plugin be it Flash or Silverlight is necessary at least in mid term. Anyway, good article.

By: britg

britg — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:51:40 +0000

Interesting points you made on you blog post. I do like the implications chrome will have on cloud computing infrastructure.

By: Gavin Bollard

Gavin Bollard — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:37:56 +0000

The effect on Adobe is very much a side-effect. The Google Chrome browser isn't intended as a "competing browser" for Mozilla, IE and the others. Instead, it's intended to bring a fast, solid and stable base to the cloud computing platform. As a result, the threat it poses is to traditional Server/Client or standalone client based computing.

See:
http://dominogavin.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-mic...

By: patrick

patrick — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:41:50 +0000

should be interesting to see if Chrome works more efficiently than FireFox and IE… if it's faster than Firefox, since isn't IE, then i'll use it