I agree it is a concern. The difference between then and now though is that the browser itself is more powerful. Thus I see the iPad as more about shifting the balance towards what you might loosely call “HTML5″ or “Ajax”, than shifting the balance back towards native apps. That’s why the Google Voice example is interesting.

The point of interest is whether Apple will gain or lose overall with its no plug-in policy.

Thanks for highlighting the issues.

Tim

I’ve been turning that phrase over in my head a few times since I read it. What does it mean to damage the Web?

I remember when I first saw Java applets. In 1996 they were amazing. One in particular captured my imagination:

http://www.math.ubc.ca/~morey/java/pyth/

That visual step-by-step proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem seemed to make the case for what the Web could do for education better than all the academic papers I’d read on the subject. Now let’s say the iPad becomes wildly popular and, through each new release, becomes more and more powerful. Let’s also assume that future versions do not support plugins.

For its users – especially the ones that adopt it as a primary way to view the Web – Jim Morey’s work will have been effectively erased. So will lots of other content that people will choose not to recreate using Apple’s preferred technologies. I’m still trying to think through all of this, but right now it strikes me that there is something deeply wrong with effectively eradicating content by making it impossible to load the software you need to experience it.

By leaving plugins out it really looks like Apple is attempting to drive developers to build native applications – especially for the iPad.

Brian, clearly Apple is attempting to do that. And it will succeed up to a point; but it won’t significantly damage the web IMO.

It is interesting to watch, since Apple is getting even more pressure over lack of Flash support than it did with iPhone. It is having to weigh lost sales from people who don’t think it offers the “full web”, against the benefits of control (which include better performance and reliability).

Tim

Now, let’s say you want to build a mobile application where you can leave a new audio greeting or reply to a message with an audio message? Can you do that today on an Apple mobile device using Safari’s support for HTML5? Or, let’s say you want to stream video via IP Multicast on your corporate network so everyone can watch corporate events without loading down your WAN with unicast streams. (This is a fairly common practice.) Can you do that on Apple’s mobile platform using Safari/HTML5? You can do both things with plugins today. So my point was that if your application needs to do more than what HTML5 provides today, Apple won’t let you use plugins to get there. You have to write native applications.

At the iPad launch I didn’t see much emphasis on HTML 5 applications for the iPad though I don’t know how YouTube for the iPhone is built. Maybe that’s one? The emphasis for developers seemed to be on native iPad applications from the New York Times, Electronic Arts and so on.

The iPad announcement changed my perspective on Apple. Without more information it’s hard to say, but I think a 1 GHz system ought to be able to run plugins when the user requests it. (They don’t have to run by default.) By leaving plugins out it really looks like Apple is attempting to drive developers to build native applications – especially for the iPad. In that sense it’s “back to native applications and the desktop.”

But, maybe I’m missing something?

Yours truly,
-Brian

So its back to native applications and the desktop.

I don’t agree. Well, clearly there is still a big role for native on Apple’s iPhone/iPad platform. But look what Google has done with Voice on the iPhone.

It’s not the end of RIA. It’s a drive towards Ajax rather than plug-ins, but the end result will be no different.

Tim

But over a billion people expect that applications will simply and securely work inside any Web page they visit. They expect to be able to book a hotel room, update financial records in their finance system, watch video, and play casual games without installing anything other than their browser and a plugin or two. You can’t seriously expect them to install desktop applications to do very many of those things for very many of the places they visit on the Web.

Of course we know that browsers aren’t as secure as they should be, but the desktop is not an alternative.

Over the years, plugins have acted as a kind of escape valve for developers. If you couldn’t do something in HTML/JavaScript/CSS you could always do it in Java or Flash. But during that time developers found, that with minimal help from Microsoft, they could still make progress at doing more and more with Ajax.

I think they have proven that Microsoft was wrong to ignore HTML/CSS/JavaScript as an application platform for so long by moving so many people from the IE team to work on Avalon. But Microsoft seems to have believed that the Web was not good enough and would not keep getting better.

In that respect there is a wonderfully informative interview with Michael Wallent here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Michael-Wallent-Advent-and-Evolution-of-WPF/

I highly recommend watching the whole thing from beginning to end. But, here is a short snippet where he compares what you can do with Dynamic HTML (in 2006) to WPF on the desktop:

“There is some ceiling they are going to get to, that is the maximum functionality they are going to get to … I kind of think about it as the line between content consumption and content creation.”

“I think that’s really the bright line…”
Later he talks about keeping WPF/e small and what Microsoft won’t do in WPF/e. One example is the ability to reflow text:

“There’s only so much code you can fit into that. We think flow text is more than just bottomless flow. You need to do things like pagination, you need to do things like hyphenation and justification to get that nice bright edge… It turns out those are really expensive features…”

Since 2006 the ceiling he refers to hasn’t been found. Adobe added a better JIT to Flash in 2007, complex text handling including reflow, hardware accelerated graphics, and limited 3D support to Flash player 10. Chrome added threads, improved JavaScript performance, and Google is experimenting with native code. Firefox and Safari performance is improving as well. And, more recently, new Silverlight features appear with each release.

It turned out that there was no clear bright line between content consumption and content creation. There are things you can’t do in a Web page that you can do with a desktop application but the list is slowly shrinking and for most developers that progress is good enough.

Now that competitive (and other pressures) have driven Microsoft back to improving Internet Explorer we may see the ceiling rise a little faster. And that’s good because a billion or so people will likely prefer thousands of mediocre Web based applications to installing thousands of desktop applications.

I never stated that you can’t produce UIs that look similar, what I am saying is that the development model is harder, its tools, such as debugger and memory profiling is tougher. Performance is also harder. Now that said I have not used extjs myself only heard about it, but it does like nice. I wonder what the support is for offline mode, but since it is, what it looks like, based on GWT, which actually does provide some useable tooling support, it might support gears (and in the future as GWT support HTML5, HTML5 offline storage). How does unit testing work in ext.js, gwt has support for this too?

I still cling to my previous assessment, you are often amazed when you see a javascript client side UI, not because it is so great, but because you never thought it could be done in a browser, because all you have seen are more or less bad web pages based on forms. Now I can’t of course speak for everyone but that is my own experience. But when you actually compare it to a rich desktop application (also done right of course) it is still behind, often by a lot (both in functionality and tooling support). Properly working clipboard functions anyone?