Adobe AIR is coroding the Internet?
Asa, one of the most public figures behind the Mozilla foundation (and thus behind Firefox), recently posted about Mozilla's goals with Firefox, and why it doesn't make sense to turn Firefox over to a for profit corporation. One of their main goals with Firefox is "to protect [the Internet] and to help it grow in ways that are beneficial to everyone rather than just a few." Their main way of accomplishing such a noble goal is to zealously protect open standards, and advance such standards through Firefox and related Mozilla technologies.
As part of Asa's blog entry, he makes this statement: "Today [the Internet] is under a renewed assault from shiny new proprietary systems like Silverlight and Air, and Mozilla must use whatever leverage it has to continue to defend open standards and interoperability so that no one is locked out of participation or locked in to the single-vendor solutions that are corroding the foundations of this amazing global shared resource."
I think his reasoning behind this "Air assaults the Internet" remark is that Air is a proprietary product, and we have no guarantee from Adobe that Air will always serve the Internet's best interests (open standards). If Air gains a huge market share, web developers will be forced to pay attention to Air users, just like we are forced to cater to IE 6 users today. So I guess I can see his point.
Personally, I am a HUGE fan of open standards, as I have wasted a lot of time over the years trying to get web sites to work in all the popular web browsers. However, I have never thought of things like Adobe Air or the Flash player as being related to the standards debate, because they are just plugins that web browsers can support. However, if Adobe has their way, I suppose they'd love to see the majority of the web run on Flash/Air.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on Asa's allegations.
Jake Munson
38 Yrs old
The browser is perfect for what the web originally was, a way to browse hyperlinked information online. It wasn't really designed to run applications, despite all the really cool things people have made it do (Google Apps, Ajaxy stuff, etc.)
I think AIR will mostly grab people trying to develop web applications, not necessarily websites. This includes intranet projects and extensions to websites, such as an upload wizard to help add content.
I don't want to have to install an AIR app for every website I visit, but I'm perfectly willing to install one for the online apps that I use all the time.
This was actually a post about a financial post, so I don't think that was the main point of Asa's remarks... more like an incidental rallying call. Still, it does sort of creep me out when I hear such needless polarities; it'd be good to clear it up.
jd/adobe
What they really mean, is the wonderful application that runs on the internet that we call the World Wide Web. One that has manifested itself through end user applications we have come to know as Web Browsers. Web Browsers facilitate many digital experiences effectively, but they are by far the be all and end all, of digital experience.
AIR does not run on the World Wide Web. It is a runtime that allows applications to be built and run on the desktop as a desktop application. It also allows developers to build these applications using Flex and Flash, but more importantly standardized technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript aka:AJAX.
So if anything it is extending the reach of standards as opposed to being an attack on them.
The most frustrating thing here is the focus on the "at the desktop" mentality of computing these days. I long for the day, where my digital lifestyle is delivered to me via standards and over the internet as opposed to from proprietary sources(like Apple). But the truth is, that the majority of so-called "universal experiences" are crappy on any device or platform other than the web browser at the desktop.
Try using the browser for a whole day on the Nintendo Wii, or the iPhone. These were apparently browsers that were apparently designed not to be "Watered Down" versions of the web. What you eventually realize is that the current approach to standards in web development is far from universal. It is tethered to an uncomfortable anti-social user engagement paradigm.
So I clearly understand the idea of "not letting proprietary standards be too powerful and widely adopted", but the fact that the Flash Player is the most distributed piece of software in history is proof that there are many problems that have needed to be solved that the standards were not equipped to solve.
I see a future where we stop confusing the concept of a "Universal Runtime" with that of a "Universal Experience". The latter is not possible. So on that, I can not fathom why standards advocates can be so vehemently in opposition to Adobe AIR. It implements the "Universal Runtime", the thing that really matters, and the thing the standards bodies are working so hard to proliferate.
While Flash can be good, it still is more of an interface to content/data then it is the actual data. (Flash video is the exception to this... it is the content). Flex follows this extremely well. Each flash swf is a chunk that cannot be divided, and this is it's limit. Websites are made of pieces... pages that can be individually linked to, keyword searched, and made extensible. Flex and Flash make a good interface, but they cannot replace the data that composes the web.
Second... AIR is a platform for applications. If Mozilla is upset that it exists, then it is their own fault. Browsers were created to browse documents, and web applications make poor documents. If they had realized the need for an Application Browser in addition to a Web Browser, then they might have started an 'open' project to provide one, before Macromedia/Adobe and Microsoft come up with one. It has been my opinion for quite some time that we've needed an application browser of some sort, and it looks like AIR might be the first candidate.
For years Macromedia already had their hand in the desktop market indirectly by licensing their player for embedded use in commercial wrappers and Adobe has simply done what was logical in the first place. I find it hard to regard them as the big bad wolf as it relates AIR which I can use to author for the desktop using my existing skillset and which previously required a rather high cost of entry. Any AS 1/2/3 developer is welcome to go price Zinc, SWFkit, mProjector and all the rest of the tools that dominate the market right....none of which are "open" and see if they agree with the assessment that Adobe is "all about the money" or feel proprietary is such a bad thing. All Adobe did was what Macromedia should have....enter the desktop market others were already cashing in on (with their embedded player no less) and redefined how it's done (and at a far lower cost of entry I might add and now it's not specific to AS programmers anymore) . If they leverage or balance that investment by making higher end tools that have price tags...power to them. Years ago...right after I realized Linux might never become the dominate "open" operating system of choice in my lifetime, it dawned on me sometimes we use proprietary systems from large commercial companies because they get the job done and let us focus on working with them instead of focusing on getting them to work.
Standards?..what standards?.......this is new ground.
Air is built on open standards, AS3 is Ecmascript and Mozilla has the Tamarind compiler, it's HTML is webkit..same used in safari. PDF is being opened up as well. So...where's the issue? Is mozilla/Firefox strong enoughto answer Microsoft volleys? are they going to
That said it's Air first, Flash/HTML second, and PDF 3rd. It's indeed corrosive as now these web technologies are living on my desktop, and writing/overrighting files. Now what used to be only accessible to C++ gurus is accessible to anybody with a text editor, a little knowledge of javascript and html, and the AIR runtime.
Also the web sucks, why is it we play XBox, watch HD tv then hit the web and are happy with RIA's hacking HTML into Operating System. Firefox (or an app on it) locks up at least 3 times a day, taking whatever I'm watching/listening with it, in AIR if I'm listening to Pandora at least the music will continue playing, and maybe even continue when the wireless connection goes down. Thankfully some sites like LiveJournal can recover gracefully but still. We are in the Windows 3.1 version of the WebOS.
You are assuming that Air will never lock up. Spoken like a true Adobe die hard.
"We are in the Windows 3.1 version of the WebOS."
I agree with you there. It IS possible to build a stable website, but because the web is a conglomeration of millions of sites, you can't guarantee that everybody out there will follow best practices, and have good usability built in.
I just checked Asa's blog entry again, and some of this debate has been occurring over there as well (thanks to JD). Someone made most of the same arguments that you all have been making, that Air and other tools like it are providing a more rich platform, one that is not very possible with HTML/JavaScript today. Asa's response: "I'd argue that it's our job (and that of the other browser vendors) to make a competitive platform on the Web so that free and open technologies can fill that crucial role. There's no reason that browsers cannot, using free and open standards, offer a compelling and even shiny platform for developers."
So really, I think Asa sees Air as a threat to the web browser. I also think he's off base, as Air will just be another platform, and you will still need to use Firefox to browse to the website that hosts the Air app you are interested in. Sure, the Air runtime is proprietary, but like you guys said, it's all based on open technologies. Firefox itself could be considered proprietary, but like Air one uses Firefox as a consumer of open technologies.
To the extent that use of Silverlight and Flash spread, there is a danger of vendor lock-in to either of these players, which goes against the current open-ness of the browser-based web.
People still have to handle IE6, for instance. The lock-in is decentralized, but far more severe.
jd/adobe
I think your point goes to what Asa was saying. Mozilla is zealously working to spread open standards, so that we can all develop once and it will work on all platforms. I don't know if that will ever happen, but that is their goal.
I've been commenting in Asa's thread today, and Asa just said this "You may not think [Flash] has a chance to take over, but Microsoft and Adobe are betting on it and battling each other for it. This worries me and that's why I mentioned it in this blog post which was otherwise about something quite different."
Why is he worried? Because like Vince said, Flash is controlled by Adobe, and Silverlight is controlled by Microsoft. There is no standards body that decides what we can/can't do with Flash. And personally, I have a lot of problems with Flash today, so I also would be very uncomfortable with Flash becoming everybody's development platform of choice. But like I said on Asa's blog, I don't see that happening.
Theoretically possible, true. Check out the feedback loops in the Kinko/Acrobat issue, however. Consider how centralized Mozilla's incoming revenue is. There are many possible scenarios.
The existence of a possible scenario, in isolation of consideration of other equally-likely scenarios, is insufficient for decisionmaking.
... and Mozilla can't decide what Microsoft will do with IE, or what Apple will do with Safari, nor how your viewing audience will choose among these varied decisionmakers....
Very true. But it is a lot easier for Mozilla to pound the pulpit about Standards that Microsoft, Apple, and Opera helped to shape. There is no pulpit to pound when they are fighting against a proprietary technology like Flash. Only one company decided what goes into the Flash player, and they have no accountability to the Internet's well being, their biggest accountability is to their shareholders.
Adobe's decentralized financial base means that it must satisfy diverse audiences simultaneously. There is exquisite pressure to get things right.
jd/adobe
Considering this, does it really sound like Adobe AIR is harmful to the Internet? Maybe people just complain because it's a "big ol' corporation" who introduced this.
Because they have their whole organization dependent on their browser technology while just a single programmer can now code their own by simply assembling Adobe AIR components.