Microsoft versus the Big Three

Software is supposed to be a mature industry, characterized by some sort of mono- or duopoly. How to explain, then, the activity around Web browsers: Three of the tech industry's biggest names--Microsoft, Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people )--each has a significant in-house browser development effort, with periodic fresh releases. Then, of course, there is the Mozilla Foundation, the folks behind the popular open-source browser Firefox.

Competition is always good, but especially these days with browsers. Features are being added to them that may, in a year or two, make a browser-based application look and feel no different from a desktop one. Imagine having the equivalent of Photoshop or PowerPoint in your browser--and thus available on whatever machine you happen to be using, desktop or smart phone or laptop.

The coming evolution in browsers is akin to the Ajax phenomenon of recent years. Ajax is a name given to a quartet of programming technologies that collectively made possible the likes of Google Maps and Gmail.

Before Ajax the typical Web site was a collection of static pages. With Ajax, programmers were able to change only part of the screen, displaying, for example, different information as you move a cursor around on a map. Ajax also allowed Web pages to be more dynamic in other ways, letting users, say, right-click and see a menu tailored to their needs.

The components of this new browser programming paradigm are esoteric. One is a new, extra-speedy Javascript interpreter, found in the latest browsers from Google and Apple, that allows programs in the browser's standard language to zip along faster than ever thought possible. Another is an Apple-created graphics technology known as Canvas, which gives programmers much more freedom using text and drawings.

Other under-the-cover changes include giving browsers the sort of sophisticated software-control features usually found only in operating systems. Web Workers, for instance, is an emerging system for isolating a browser's individual tasks into separate "threads," making it easier for a browser-based program to perform a computationally intensive task such as photo-editing in a background tab while the user is attending to something else, like e-mail, in the foreground.

This new approach to programming doesn't yet have a handy name like Ajax, though some refer to it as HTML 5. No browser yet has all of these new elements. Apple, Google and Mozilla have pieces. All are competing to add more.

 

So far there are no Google Maps-style killer apps for this new programming approach; indeed, programmers are just beginning to wake up to the possibilities. But one modest example is an early version of the sort of text editor used by engineers for writing computer programs. It's at bespin.mozilla.com and works with the Mozilla browser, Firefox.

Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, the Mozilla engineers who developed the site, said it will be expanding into a full-blown "programming environment" for the new software approach, but one that itself uses the same technologies that programmers will be making use of to build other applications. In a year or two, they say, software will be available that is indistinguishable from traditional desktop programs. The two men helped chronicle the Ajax movement; Galbraith said the new tools "have us more excited than we were for Ajax."

Many people assume that browser-based programs would run "in the cloud," that is, on servers situated remotely at companies like Google or Amazon. But Almaer said there's no reason software has to be written that way. A photo-editing program based in a browser, for instance, could run entirely on your desktop. PCs have power to spare.

Who wins and who loses with this new approach? Adobe (nasdaq: ADBE - news - people ) might not look too kindly upon it. The maker of Flash software would prefer that programmers stick with its software. Microsoft usually doesn't warm to standards it can't control; it is also pushing its new Silverlight multimedia program, which performs some of the functions of HTML 5 software.

Apple, Google and Mozilla, by contrast, favor anything that curbs Microsoft's market position. The three cooperate in browser development even as they compete for market share. If the day arrives when a browser is the only program anyone needs, those three would be among the ones cheering loudest.

Senior editor Lee Gomes covers technology from our Silicon