Browsers, Browsers, ARM

We’ve had an interesting week, with lots of news on web browsers, phones, and ARM netbooks. For instance, Opera launched Unite, Microsoft started a “Get the facts” campaign for Internet Explorer 8, NVIDIA talked about Windows CE, and much, much more.

Early on in the week, Opera announced a technology that they think will revolutionise the internet. It’s called Opera Unite, and will allow Opera users to connect to one another through Opera’s proxies. Even though not many demonstration applications are currently available, they claim it has a lot of potential.

Later on in the week Microsoft launched its “Get the facts” campaign for Internet Explorer 8 – which got debunked and torn to shreds instantly by everyone on the net. As sleazy as the campaign might be, it is a sign of something good: competition. Microsoft actually has to start marketing campaigns to get people to use Internet Explorer, which is a sign that the browser market is getting ever healthier.

To finish off the browser news, we had an item about the open letter Kroc sent to Mozilla. Even though Mozilla has been promoting HTML5 video, a post at the Hacks.Mozilla.org blog advocated encapsulating the video tag in JavaScript to create a fallback mechanism for browsers that do not support HTML5 video. Kroc stated this goes against the very goals of the video tag, and as such, pointed this out to Mozilla. Kroc isn’t just an armchair critic, though, and has a solution for fallback that is far superior.

Apart from browsers, we were also really into (ARM) netbooks this week. For instance, NVIDIA made it clear they prefer Windows CE as the operating system for their ARM-based Tegra platform, instead of Android or Linux-proper. We also talked about people stating that Android should stick to smartphones, and leave netbooks alone. Funnily enough, analyst firm Gartner stated earlier in the week that they were impressed by Android on netbooks.

The iPhone and Palm Pre were also popular this week, mostly because of the launch of iPhoneOS 3.0. There was also bad news when Apple more or less gave the finger to iPhone developers during WWDC. As for the Palm Pre, we discussed its relatively hacker-friendly nature, as well as its SDK.

On a more serious note, we also discussed the elections, and the unrest that followed, in Iran, and the importance of blogs and other web 2.0 stuff for the protesters.