Charles on… anything that comes along

Interesting to read Dave Hyatt (the chief developer of Apple’s Safari browser talking about the extensions being made to HTML in order to make the new Dashboard feature in Tiger, aka OSX 10.4, work.

He’s at pains to emphasise that it’s not just being done within Apple, and that the plan is to share:
I wanted to emphasize that we are working with other browser vendors such as Opera and Mozilla to ensure that these extensions are implementable in those browsers and that these extensions can be standardized. We are not simply off “doing our own thing.”.

Their worry being that Longhorn is going, by virtue of extending the web page onto the desktop, so completely non-standard that it will otherwise make life impossible for the rival browsers. But if they can have neat widgets on web pages, where you’ll have to view them with something *other than IE* to work, you’ll have an incentive to switch. And remember, Microsoft isn’t developing IE as a separate product any more, so it probably wouldn’t come out with a stopgap version before Longhorn.

You can argue that the widget-enabled web pages would take ages to appear, but so will web pages that use Longhorn’s extensions, because the takeup of that will stretch well past 2010 before it reaches 50%. Look at Google’s stats for who’s using which OS. WinXP has only 50%, despite being released in 2001.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Get it while it's late: my exclusive review of Tiger (you know.. that new software thing) (2 May 2005; score: 88.44%)
• My Tiger report: Spotlight and Dashboard are amazingly sloooooooow (31 May 2005; score: 74.05%)
• How not to write an operating system review: Paul Thurrott shows you (16 April 2005; score: 69.56%)