Google on app development: “The Web has won”
Google has claimed the Web is the future of application development, not individual operating systems. The firm’s Vic Gundotra said today, “The Web has won.”
Speaking at a conference Google organized for developers, Gundotra argued that the Web “has become the dominant programming model of our time.”
Gundotra conceded that he’s had a change of heart on the subject. When previously working for Microsoft, he argued that Web applications could not compete with the range available on desktop-based systems. Speaking in 2004, he gave the example of mapping software from a firm named Keyhole as something that couldn’t work as a Web application. Ironically Google later bought that firm out and used its technology as the basis of Google Earth.
The speech wasn’t simply a way of promoting services such as Gmail and Google Docs. Gundotra also praised the emergence of HTML 5, the latest set of standards for Web pages. The key development with this generation of standards is that it is aimed at allowing application developers to produce tools which will work on any browser, without having to worry about what operating system a user is running.
With all major browsers except Internet Explorer supporting the standards, Gundotra took a wry dig at his former employer: “You can imagine how excited we were to hear Microsoft’s public statement about their commitment to the HTML 5 standard. And we eagerly await actually seeing evidence of that.”
Google also announced that it’s using HTML 5 to make it easier for developers to embed applications directly into a browser itself, rather than requiring the user to download and install them. It demonstrated a mocked-up version of YouTube which could play clips directly on the page without the user needing to install any plug-ins such as Flash. However, Google has no plans to run YouTube in this way and simply used it to show off the application/browser tie-up concept.
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