Bing has Silverlight and Google has HTML 5
Google is pulling the plug on Gears, its plug-in for all browsers, in favor of HTML 5, the web standard of the future. Adoption of HTML 5 by all should ensure that Internet works uniformly across all browsers, across all platforms. On the other hand, Microsoft has its Silverlight plug-in on the brain. The new Bing Maps that was announced earlier this week for example, needs Silverlight, and so will Internet Explorer 9, when it comes out. This completely fouls up Google’s plans for a plug-in free future. Having disparate standards on the Internet makes it very difficult for web developers to design pages that behave as expected across platforms. Browser designers use an application called Acid3, put out by the Web Standards Project to check a web browser for compatibility with web standards, not least relating to the Document Object Model and JavaScript. All the major browsers pass it with flying colors; Internet Explorer, with its proprietary standards and plug-in happy architecture, barely gets 20% in the test. Microsoft argues that their choices are not about maintaining proprietary competition, but about using the latest and the best technology out there. Using AJAX as other web browsers do, would simply be using old technology they complain.
HTML 5 would be truly cross-browser if adopted; it won’t even need Adobe Flash to play video. Certainly, Silverlight is more advanced; the trick that Bing Maps achieves with its seamless movement between map view and street-level view certainly is breathtaking. But getting people to install a plug-in is quite a headache for web developers. The effects achievable by plug-ins while very impressive, most often will not work at all because lots of people out there don’t even know how to install one. There is a video out on YouTube where a journalist goes about asking people in New York what browser they use; most of them reply “Yahoo” or “Google”. How do you get people like this to install a plug-in? The answer is, you don’t. You use an HTML 5 browser that does everything straight out of the box.
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