HTML5 refactoring the Internet: browsers will partially replace the operating system

Source: Internet
Author: User
Keywords Internet HTML5
Browsers can replace the operating system in part, and will make the current endless software application stores redundant, HTML5 is likely to reconstruct the infrastructure of the Internet Apple has been the most staunch supporter of the next generation of Web language HTML5 and is now facing new and formidable challengers.  According to foreign media in June, social networking site Facebook is secretly developing apps based on the next-generation Web language HTML5 to get rid of the company's App Store's stranglehold on Facebook in the Mobile world. At the start of last year, Apple insisted that it did not support Adobe's web-page video-player Flash player, when it launched a high-profile tablet ipad.  Apple's smartphone was not supported by Adobe's Software, and CEO Steve Jobs explained that--flash was better suited to PCs than mobile phones.  In April 2010, Jobs had a long channel out of it, and jobs believed that Flash was designed for the PC and the mouse age, and that it was no longer necessary for Internet video browsing, and that the new standard HTML5 the future. Flash Player is currently the most popular technology for playing online video, and Adobe CEO Kevin Linch says more than 75% of the world's online video uses Flash Player.  In the Chinese market, the ratio is even higher, or more than 90%. How do we watch online video without Adobe Flash Player? Given Flash Player's current huge stock market, it will take time to replace it.  "The incompatibility will allow users and content creators to" return to the medieval Europe, "Lynch said in a statement, because the HTML5 are now showing different effects in different browsers. The two founders of Adobe also publicly identified Apple as trying to control the entire Internet.  At the end of the long letter, Jobs said, perhaps Adobe should focus on developing HTML5 tools in the future, rather than criticizing Apple products for not supporting Flash Player. In the interview of Caijing reporter, respondents thought that HTML5 would be the trend of the times.  Hua, founder partner of Innovation Workshop, said that the new development of the Internet was the core cause of change, and HTML5 just met the needs of new trends. Apple's battle with Adobe is just the corner of the Internet war that HTML5 has sparked and will spark.  This slow but far-reaching war will reconstruct the Internet that we see today.  Innovation Factory founder Lee Kai-Fu said that when there are many platforms in the world, the platform will benefit from the HTML5, but also because of the existence of multi-platform, HTML5 to show its cross-platform value. What HTML5 can do on the internet there is a huge amount of information circulating, when we want to visit, browse andThis information, we need to use the Web browser such tools. Information Publishers use specific specifications to write the information to be disseminated to form the content of the Web page, while the browser according to a unified specification, to read, interpret and display this information.  In the earliest period of the Internet, the content displayed by the browser is very monotonous. In 1982, Tim Berners Lee created the HTML language (Hyper text Markup Language, Hypertext Markup Language) to enable physicists around the world to facilitate collaborative research.  HTML at the time was based on plain text format, which was designed to structure the Internet information, including headings, paragraphs, and lists. It was also Tim Berners Lee, who invented the first web browser World Wide Web in 1990.  This is also the origin of the "World Wide Web". Web page writer through HTML set up the specification, the content and content of the format to write HTML file, the browser by reading the content and format of the information to a more visible and optimized interface, displayed in front of the user.  As a result, the functionality that the HTML language can achieve determines the information that Internet users can see through the browser. With the increase in usage, plain text is clearly unable to meet the needs. In 1993, Marc Andreessen the first to add tags to his mosaic browser, which is to achieve a picture browsing on a Web page.  Later, he created the rage "Netscape" browser. Also in 1993, the HTML created by Tim Berners Lee was released as a draft by the Internet Engineering Working Group (IETF), becoming an international standard, maintained by the Internet Federation (the Global Consortium).  The most widely used HTML version is the 1999 recommended by the Consortium, with the version number 4.01. Yu, chief executive of Science and Technology, said that the Internet content is mainly two kinds, one is the Web page, the other is the application, HTML4 for the Web page support has been very good.  At present, UCWeb Technology's mobile browser has more than 200 million users. In the 12 years since 1999, the Internet has grown by leaps and bounds, but in 12 years, HTML4 standards have not been revised. In this process, the scripting language JavaScript and the release of XHTML are implemented with enhanced functionality.  However, HTML4 is already lagging behind in support of network applications. 2004, the Web Hypertext Technology Working Group (WHATWG) presented a draft of HTML5, formerly known as Web Creator 1.0. It can be clearly seen from this name that HTML5 's proposal is to solve the demand of network application. 2007, the draft was accepted by the consortium and a new HTML team was established, early 2008, the firstA formal draft is published. So far, seven years have passed, and HTML5 still stays in the draft stage.  Ian Hickson, a Google representative responsible for compiling standard format documents, expects to wait until 2012 to launch a "proposal candidate". HTML4 can not meet the needs, but HTML5 delayed the launch. To address the new needs of the Internet, a large stack of plug-ins (Plug-in) and extensions (Add-on) came into being, and the representative is Adobe's Flash Player.  Hua said that when the web was originally designed, the web would become a platform for the program to run, so the Flash player later made up for the space. Originally, Flash Player was designed and developed to display dynamic ads on the Web page. As demand grows and flash technology expands, Flash Player is now an integral part of browsing the Internet.  Almost all web videos are played by Flash Player, and the rise and popularity of web games is closely related to the technical support provided by Flash Player. Yu says the popularity of the first online video is done by installing local clients, while Flash Player makes it possible to watch the video directly from the browser.  Flash Player as the representative of Plug-ins and extensions, enhance the browser's ability to complement the HTML4 can not provide the functionality. But after the release of HTML5, these plug-ins may be difficult to escape the fate of abandonment.  As can be seen from the draft HTML5, the native HTML5 language is already available in most of the functions that require plug-ins and extensions to complete. Currently, mainstream browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and IE have started to support HTML5. Using these browsers, even if you are not installing Flash Player, you can still watch Internet video. The premise is that these Internet video applications also support HTML5.  Domestic video site Youku has started to support HTML5, and users can use the iphone or ipad to watch Youku's video content directly from the Web. The enhancement of image function is another bright spot of HTML5.  HTML5 provides JavaScript-based 2D drawing capabilities and WebGL 3D drawing capabilities, while HTML4 only supports picture and text features, which means that HTML5 can achieve good web game functionality without the need for any plug-ins or extended help. Hua that flash technology is built on years of accumulated development framework, code base and development tools. and flash developers have formed a scale and community, able to use the original code base and development tools for more efficient development. In this respect HTML5 need to be built, which meansIt takes a long time to accumulate. The more exciting feature of HTML5 is its ability to provide Web data storage and offline data storage, and more interfaces enable browsers to handle local data more strongly.  This allows the browser to partially replace the operating system. Although the HTML5 in the draft has not yet formed a uniform standard, its new features will undoubtedly change the existing Internet form.  This change may even be subversive. OS no longer important dominate PC operating system is Microsoft likely to be subverted for decades?  Browsers seem likely to complete a "historical mission" to subvert Microsoft. Depending on the strategy of bundling with Windows operating systems, ie once accounted for more than 90% of the world's market share.  But today, according to the latest statistics from NET applications, IE's global market share has fallen to 55%. Grabbing IE's share includes Mozilla's Firefox browser, Google's Chrome and Apple Safari.  With Microsoft losing its browser, even Marc Andreessen, who was defeated by Microsoft, is poised to develop new browsers to make a comeback.  For Microsoft, the loss of browser share is clearly not the most lethal, the real core of the threat is that, with IE scenery no longer, Microsoft is likely to be in the next Internet era facing the challenges of the elevated. Last August, the article published in Wired magazine, saying that "The web is dead, the Internet is immortal", has sparked widespread discussion.  With the iphone and ipad becoming the mainstream of terminals, app will make the browser's role irrelevant and even fade away, the article argues. However, "wired" has not been measured by the HTML5 in the future to play an important role.  With the introduction and popularity of HTML5, browsers will be more powerful, so powerful that it could replace Microsoft's trump card product-the operating system Windows and Office software office. Prior to the advent of HTML5, users would need to install video clients or Flash Player plug-ins in a computer operating system to enable them to view Internet video.  After the advent of HTML5, mainstream browsers will be able to watch Internet video directly without installing any other assistive software. Because HTML5 enhances the image feature, most games will be able to run directly in the browser without having to install the client in the operating system.  A lot of games will be able to run directly on the browser platform, no longer need to use the operating system. In addition, HTML5 provides networked storage and local storage capabilities.  Browser-based Online document products will greatly impact the market share of office software. Google has apparently already laid out the layout. At present, Google's online documentation products have accumulated a large number of users, with the HTML5 to provide a strongerWord processing capabilities and storage capabilities, the average user will be able to meet the needs of the Office through online documentation.  Yu that in the foreseeable future, it is necessary to install on the PC operating system software on the two major categories, including browsers, security software, such as the general class of basic software, the other is a higher demand for the game, other programs will be gradually moved to the browser.  This process has already begun, many computer users of the operating system, the number of software installation is significantly reduced compared to the previous, the day-to-day use of the functions required, can easily be achieved through the browser.  The less software that is installed in the operating system, the lower the importance of the operating system. Recently, Google launched a netbook product: Chromebook. The netbook's boot time takes only 5 seconds, and after entering the system, the user's intuitive interface is Google's Chrome browser.  Users will be able to do all the work that they previously needed to do on the PC's operating system, including document editing, Web browsing, listening to music, watching videos and even playing games, which can be stored in Google's "cloud computing" service or locally.  With Chromebook, there is no need to care about operating system features, and all of the work is done almost in the browser, thanks to HTML5. The McKinsey report argues that HTML5 will allow programs to run through browsers, and the browser will become a general-purpose computing platform that allows users to do everything without leaving the browser.  As the operating system becomes less important, the fundamentals of Microsoft's business model will be shaken.  Such a process does not necessarily immediately replace Microsoft's operating system and office software products, but even just 1% is hitting Microsoft's core business, and as the ratio rolls up, the threat to Microsoft is the loss of a huge market in the area of personal users, Lee said. This prospect, of course, is now merely a trend. Also, Microsoft is embracing HTML5, which will fully support HTML5 technology in its new operating system WINDOWS8.  But it is the biggest test of how much dominance Microsoft can continue to hold in the process. Bad news from the App Store Apple is HTML5 's supporter, and when it first conceived the iphone, Jobs had envisioned a lot of apps running in the browser.  In the original design of the iphone, Safari browsers were significantly more effective than we've seen today. Two things have hampered jobs ' vision, first of all, the limitations of hardware performance at the time, and the old HTML language and many plug-ins that make it inefficient for browsers to run programs.  Apple eventually chose to solve the problem in the App store format, and developers developed applications based on the iOS operating system to make applications more efficient and more effective. With the advent of the iphone and ipad, local programs developed based on the operating systemand used to display and sell these apps, the App Store has expanded into all aspects of mobile devices, represented by smartphones and tablets, and has spread to PCs.  The popularity of apps on mobile computing devices has made Wired magazine sigh that browsers are no longer important. Can HTML5 change this process?  In another year, Yu predicts, the app's enthusiasm for development will fall. The current scenery Unlimited app also has its innate drawbacks. For ordinary iphone users, the average number of apps installed on each phone reaches dozens of. With each app update, users will need to update the app by using the store.  As the number of app installations increases, the process becomes annoying and consumes network traffic. In addition, even if you want to complete a particularly simple feature, you still need to download the program from the application store.  For example, query weather, for browsers, just enter keywords in the search engine work, but on the smartphone becomes an application, and such applications, many users use very low frequency. The essence of the Internet is the free flow of information everywhere and in the absence of it.  But the current app, however, because of its encapsulation of the reasons, the formation of the islands of information, applications between the interface is not connected, resulting in the app can not like browser applications, sharing information between each other.  At the developer level, app's approach solves the toll problem, but it's also a huge hassle. Hua to Caijing reporter that the application store for developers, the loss of good product feedback and development cycle.  An updated version, it will take at least two weeks for the Apple to audit, and the feedback after the user downloads will take at least one months to reach the developer, "which is unacceptable to many internet companies."  As the variety of mobile computing devices increases, developers need to adapt to different operating systems and models, which wastes a lot of capital and developer effort. As far as the current operating system is concerned, consumers are familiar with Apple's iOS, Google's Android, RIM's BlackBerry, Nokia's Symbian, Microsoft's WP and HP's webOS.  Unless developed for a particular system, a popular game like "Crazy Bird" needs to develop a different version for all of these systems.  To make matters worse, with Android being used by a large number of mobile device manufacturers, different device models even require developers to modify and adapt applications. Lei's founder, Zhao, worked in mobile phone program development for nearly ten years before starting a business. He said that the development and maintenance of different operating systems and different models of applications, occupy the capital and energy investment, and the development of a new application is almost the same. He believes that the advent of HTML5 will make up for all of the above app flaws, allowing the application of mobile devices back to the browser platform。 And based on the browser development and operation of the application, Google is in the design of the concept of chrome. At the end of last year, the number of apps in the Chrome App Store broke through 10,000.  These apps are similar to iphone apps, and the big difference is that iphone apps run on the operating system and chrome apps are browser-based. Based on the application of the browser, can realize automatic update, do not need the user to upgrade. Because of the versatility of HTML5, as long as browsers support HTML5, it means using HTML5 developed applications that can run on all operating systems and models.  This is the original intention of Java design, "Development once, everywhere available." The universality of the HTML5, through the application of different operating systems and models between the obstacles, forming a huge cross-platform advantage.  With the improvement of the hardware performance of mobile devices and the improvement of browser efficiency, the application based on browser development, its efficiency and performance will soon overtake the OS based app. The advantages of OS-based apps are fading, and the barriers that Apple has built in this area will be gradually spent. Developers will not have to care about the development of the program, whether it is iOS or Android, only to HTML5 development.  The browsers that are on the mobile device will run these HTML5 programs almost without distinction. This is a wonderful future. Hua says app bugs like Apple's mobile devices are already very clear, and HTML5 browser-based apps are "a path of freedom" for developers.  Once apps in Apple's App Store no longer have a quantitative and qualitative advantage, Apple's current overwhelming advantage over mobile devices will gradually be lost. If HTML5 is widely available, the advantages of OS-based apps will become less obvious and will be hit by a huge impact on product richness, user experience and cross domain content sharing, Lee said. "Although it is difficult to die in the short term, it is possible in the long run. "If all this is true, then it is not impossible for Apple's mobile devices to return to browsers, after all, for now, Apple's Safari is one of the best to support HTML5."  And Apple does feel real pressure on that. In June this year, foreign media said Facebook was secretly developing a HTML5 application project called "Sparta", which was designed to get rid of the Spartan of Apple's App Store for Facebook in the Mobile world.  Facebook wants to use the HTML5 project to launch its own game apps and proprietary app-buying and payment channels, not the app Store. This is obviously not good news for Apple. Share to:
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