Insider Information

I have a prediction, and it's about computing. Since there are so few times that I actually have enough information to predict something like this, I'm going to share it all with you:

Web browsers are going to become a lot more important soon.

"Why's that", you say? (Or, maybe, "that's it"?). Well, several things have happened at once, all of which increase the power of programs running on a browser.

1. First, HTML5 has increased the power of the canvas element. Normally, when you want to see some fancy interactions online, you have to install flash player. The canvas element means any page can display whatever dynamic content it wants to with ease.
2. Second, a nascent form of support for WebGL was added to Webkit. WebGL allows canvas elements to use hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. In other words, those fancy graphics I mentioned in point 1 can now be 3D. Webkit powers Google Chrome and Safari (for MacOS), which leads us to point 3...
   
3. Canvas support for Internet Explorer, sort of. Traditionally, Internet Explorer has always lagged behind in terms of features. Lots of people use IE, so my whole theory would be dead in the water if Microsoft didn't upgrade the world's most popular browser. Surprisingly enough, Google stepped up and wrote a plugin for IE that uses Webkit to render pages inside of IE itself. Besides enabling the canvas element, this also makes IE run ten times faster!

With Google's IE plugin, that means that three major browsers will be running Webkit. Firefox and Opera will almost definitely support HTML5 from day one, if their mission statements and respective histories are any indication. So all major browsers will have the ability to run fancy applications. Now, there's two more things to consider:

• Most browsers are platform-independent. In other words, if I view a page in Safari on Windows, it will look the exact same as if I was viewing it on Safari in MacOS --or Chrome on Windows, for that matter. This applies to developers, too --if I develop a plugin for Firefox on Linux, it will require very little additional work to also run in Firefox on Windows. (Chrome promises to run Firefox plugins too, but we'll see...)
  
• Cloud Computing, Ubuntu, cheap hardware, and various other small factors are all adding up to one thing: people are using more computers (and operating systems) than they would have five years ago.

Roll that all together, and you can see where I'm going with this: people want more versatility, more portability, and more compatibility. Their browsers are poised to deliver this. One day soon, one of the major browsers will hit on the bright idea of offering to render a web page without using their own browser frame, and that'll fire off the whole revolution. At that point, you'll be able to download your favorite "Firefox application" --a word processor, a calculator, a music player-- and save it to a flash drive. You'll then be able to plug that flash drive in to any computer running any operating system with Firefox, and it'll run as if you're using it on your own computer. Programmers will start targeting browsers instead of operating systems. All these "miniature Linux" distributions will jump in popularity. It'll be exactly the kind of revolution that Adobe Air tried to start, except this time it'll work --because people will already have all the necessary software installed. By the way, I think Google's trying to get on the bandwagon early with Google Wave. I have no idea if this will work, but it's certainly a good attempt.

So there you have it, the only bit of information I have that you probably don't have. Assuming this prediction of mine isn't totally off, then the only remaining question is which browser to buy stocks in. And that's an easy answer: for now, Firefox. It's the only truly cross-platform, truly pluggable browser. Eventually, Google Chrome will surpass it, or possibly some horrid conglomerate of Internet Explorer and Webkit. But that'll be long after the initial surge.

And then, maybe, finally, I can stop using this terrible web interface to enter blog posts, where hitting "Backspace" to delete a letter occasionally sends me to totally different web page. Here's hoping.