Venture Geek

[After writing this I realized that I didn’t bother to explain a lot of things to those of you who might not be web geeks — and really, if aren’t one you probably aren’t going to be interested in this topic anyway….]

I haven’t read a lot of the coverage of Apollo in the last couple days, but I have been following the project for a few months (I remain in the Macromedia, now Adobe, ecosystem from my ColdFusion development days). I think Apollo has some tremendous potential to unleash a new wave of products that will change the way we think about the distinctions between “web-based” and “client-based” applications. Apollo seems like it may be the perfect platform to build really great online/offline applications that interface with existing services — and with such an accessible yet rich and network-friendly environment for building client-side applications I think the uses of web services (in the SOAP/REST/etc. sense) will really start to mature. Time will tell whether penetration of the Apollo runtime can ramp quickly enough to make deploying such applications a no-brainer, and with all of the major investments in AJAX-based tools there will certainly continue to be interested applications deployed in “pure web” environments.

But, others have written at greater length with more thought on those topics.

What I find quite interesting but seemingly under-covered is that Adobe chose WebKit as their HTML rendering engine in Apollo. WebKit is Apple’s branching of KHTML (for those who know what that means I don’t need to go into details, and for those who don’t, you won’t care about the details). WebKit is what Apple uses in their Safari browser (and as the underlying set of APIs provided to all OS X developers).

I have been a regular Safari user more or less since I bought my first OS X machine in 2003. I have had a love-hate relationship with Safari. I love the way it supports RSS, and I generally find it to be a perfectly good browser — but, it can’t keep up with my browsing habits of having lots of windows with lots of tabs open. To be fair, when I have tried Firefox and Camino and Flock, all Gecko-based browsers, they also couldn’t keep up. The bigger issue with Safari is that given its low penetration many developers don’t bother doing QA on their sites using Safari, or, more commonly, make a conscious decision to not bother supporting Safari (especially for the initial launch of new companies). I now usually have both Safari and Camino open (and often another browser or two), using Safari as my “main” browser and Camino when Safari is being too slow or I run across a site that isn’t rendering properly in Safari (most developers these days will make their site work in Firefox — and Camino uses most of the same underlying technologies).

But, now that Apollo is using WebKit and Adobe is getting ready to throw some serious muscle behind getting massive adoption of the Apollo runtime (which you will need to install to use an Apollo application) the overall market share of WebKit should rise dramatically — perhaps so dramatically that developers will no longer be able to ignore it, creating three major platforms to support (Microsoft being the obvious other one) when launching a web-based service. Of course, with Adobe contributing code WebKit will also hopefully do a better job of being compatible with the way Firefox does things (and yes, I know that many in the WebKit community claim that WebKit is doing it the “right” way now — but, adoption matters more than standards in such disputes).

As a Safari user this is potentially a great thing because if Apollo takes off (as many think it will) developers will no longer be able to flash up their “You Are Using an Unsupported Browser” message. But, as a web developer, this creates yet another layer of debugging and support that will probably need to be addressed even for new applications. I remember when Microsoft was declared to have “won” the browser wars, and although few were rooting for them there was some sense of relief that we’d no longer need to worry about the vagaries of different browsers — with the ever-increasing share of Firefox and now the advent of WebKit in Apollo the browser wars seem to be heating up, albeit more quietly this time.