This is awesome. I am excited to see the new browser wars. This reminds me of Netscape Navigator/IE 3.0 days..!
I hope this brings some much needed out-of-the-box-thinking of the whole browser-to-server interactions. Here is a good list of the feature requests by OpenAJAX Alliance.
In my career so far, I have written various types Rich-Client applications on Browser using various forms of HTTP tunneling for server interaction:
- Java AWT/Swing Applets: Custom Java serialization
- Flash/Flex: Flash Remoting/AMF/ASTranslator
- AJAX: XML-RPC, JSON
All of the above suffer from at least one issue that I know of. The browser client application has to poll to get server updates to the Clients. There is no server-HTTP-push. This leads to unnecessary complexity in the Client-side code (usually in JavaScript or ActionScript).
I hope there will be some sort of an effort towards raw sockets (or something similar but more powerful than XHR) for the browser with proper sandboxing for the plugins to reduce the security issues due to raw sockets. This means that JavaScript language might have to include some support for network programming too.
Another thing I really wish is a simple/powerful API on the Google browser to write new plugins and widgets.
