Entries from September 2008 ↓

Most of the people reading this blog feel great passion for their work. In that context we are probably different from most of the world. From what i have experienced most of the world treats work as a way to aid *real* life. While this is completely acceptable, there are certain advantages to being passionate about work and life in general.

Advantages:

• Purpose: Waking up with a list of things which need to be completed. Not drifting is a huge plus in life
• Pride: We take great pride in what we do, we wear it on our sleeves. I work on X, i maintain Y and i contribute to Z.
• Identity: People who love what they do always have an Identity of their own.

Having said that, We also need to be aware of its disadvantages. To be successful we need to fight these. I will just enumerate one, cant think of too many others.

Pride: Wait a minute? Wasnt this an advantage? No its not. We are all so involved in what we do, the big picture somehow becomes obscure. We loose track of the objective and become involved with the effort. This is a continuous annoyance and requires great awareness to avoid.

The purpose of any task is to reach the objective we set out to achieve and the effort involved is pointless if that objective cant be achieved and we need to continously remind ourselves of that fact.

Pride gets in the way of progress. Its not about the effort, its about the objective!

I have been reading a lot of reviews about Chrome. Most people seem to be comparing it to Firefox, which i think is underestimating Chromes capabality. I think its has nothing to do with the browser at all, it has everything to do with the platform.

For long we have touted web as a platform, Apple took the first big step when it chose the web as its Platform for the first generation iphone. That approach failed because the web as a platform was flawed, the reasons IMHO were as follows:

• Hard to write stateful web apps
• Lack of per website security (All apps run in the same address space)
• No access to hardware (relates to security)
• Javascript is slow
• No offline support.

When Apple released an SDK it was an admission of defeat. Chris Messina put it beautifully in his blog post Did the web fail the iphone?. With millions of developers and amazing momentum the web has too much to offer for it to not be premium application development platform. So in that sense the browser was not the premium peice, the platform was.

When Google released Chrome, each one of those questions seem to find an answer.

• Hard to write stateful apps/ no offline support: Chrome includes Gears.
• Lack of per website security: Each tab in chrome runs in a seperate process, which also means this process can be given special permissions based on its security certificate! So your bank application can finally update to your harddisk and your passbook can be available offline! Wheee
• No access to hardware: Again comes down to security, read above
• Javascript is slow: Javascript virtual machine in chrome will make it reasonably fast

All this put together makes the web more promising as a platform. There are challenges though, Javascripts continous development as a language is of great importance. Read this if you want to know about JS Harmany and Ecmascript issues.

All in all the chrome platform is of great signifcance, i think its real competitors are j2me/java/cocoa/wpf and not the browsers. Only time will tell if the web as a real platform will materialize.