Mashable reads: “Adobe to Bring Flash-Based Ads to iPhone: Adobe has partnered with ad company Greystripe to deliver Flash-based ads to Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Greystripe makes this possible by converting Flash ads (which the devices do not currently support) into the competing HTML5 format”

Now, has Adobe stopped for a second to think, if you can do everything Flash can do in html5, why using Flash at all?  The one advantage that I see is to re-tool banners in multiple media and leverage assets for web & mobile — which is a strong statement … but it does not mean Flash will run in the iPhone, and it most likely mean that not all Flash functionality will work either …

Every step Adobe makes to expand Flash to the iPhone just takes them a step backwards and make people start saying Flash is dead. I do not believe Flash is dead, but that deserves a full article which I will post soon.

The fact that this page is only accessible using the Safari browser, while Apple advocates about web standards, has caused many to criticize the company’s lack of broader platform support. The showcase demonstrates several HTML5 capabilities and features that have to do with video, typography, transitions, audio, etc. Further, on the front page the company states that ‘Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.’ The latter statement falls short by the fact that the featured examples only work with the Safari browser, and in the case of the CSS 3D transforms demonstration, require Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Safari PC or plain Leopard won’t do).

Safari scores 113/160 for html5, while chrome scores 142/160 … try it yourself at html5test.com.

Apple tried to showcase innovation and successfully did it cross-device in a controlled environment, but if they are to claim supporting open standards, they should really make it open.

1) Open http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/canopy/ and click launch experiment … tried it with Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 4 beta … Chrome wins by far …. granted, this code was built to showcase Chrome specific advantages and should not reflect Safari generic JavaScript performance, but it’s pretty sweet.

2) Chrome Extensions : https://chrome.google.com/extensions … wow, I had no idea this existed… this is the main reason I like Firefox, all the nice tools …

All n’ all, I still use Safari as my main browser, Firefox to look behind the scenes, dev tools, and now I’ll try Chrome a little more too.

P.S. Posting this entry using Chrome to test wordpress compatibility; thus far, all good.

[update] P.S.2 Extensions does not seem to work for Mac. Hopefully they’ll enable them soon

[update] P.S.3 Enable extensions for Mac through this little hack-around

Google Chrome Logo

Google Chrome Autocomplete (1/2)

Google Chrome Autocomplete (2/2)

Google Chrome Bookmark

Google Chrome Calendar

Google Chrome Homepage (1/2)

Google Chrome Homepage (2/2)

Google Chrome Incognito

Google Chrome Settings

Google Chrome Status Bar

Google Chrome Tabs

Google Chrome Task Manager

Google Chrome Logo

Google announced today that they will release their own browser tomorrow, code named Google Chrome. Beta version will be launched tomorrow morning only, initially available only for Windows.

[update].  Google Chrome beta is now live and can be downloaded here.

Google Chrome is open source and based on WebKit, which is the same engine used by Safari and Adobe AIR. This is really good news because just the thought of yet another browser with different JavaScript and CSS engines to test every site and web app is really unpleasant.

Why did Google re-invent the wheel?

Their story is that they want a better browser, and coming from Google, I have no doubt that it could be. Google Chrome features:

• Open Source, based on WebKit, and includes Google Gears. For those of you not familiar with Gears, it’s a project that allows extending web apps and letting them interact naturally with the desktop, store data locally, and run JavaScript in the background to improve performance.
• V8: JavaScript Virtual Machine. The browser includes an open source project JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8. I don’t know much about the project now, but by judging that Flash did with their VM, it can only be good.
• The tabs will be on top of the address bar, not below. They will also be fully sandboxed, which means that all processed and memory will be managed separately for each tab. This immediately sounds as overhead or memory hog, but it totally makes sense. I usually have at least 50 open tabs and I have when I have to restart the entire browser because one of them crashed.
• Address bar auto-complete: Google added auto-completion logic to the address bar and called it omnibox.
• Homepage: a special homepage will feature a set of thumbnails, easy links, and searches that feature your most visited sites, recent bookmarks, and recently closed tabs.
• New privacy mode: Google Chrome will allow setting a tab as anonymous or incognito, guarantying that nothing will get logged into the computer. Not to be confused with anonymous browsing using public anonymous proxy servers.

Why did Google re-invent the wheel: Another side of the coin?

We all know that Google supports the Mozilla foundation, so why would they launch their own browser? Well, why did they launch maps, analytics, gmail, it’s all about data. Google controls so much information, it’s scary.

Google is just the smartest company out there and follows a simple rule: information is money. Everyone knows that they make all their money is ads, and have like a thousand other services that do not make money; but the truth is that some of those services provide them insides to consumer information that allows them to better target their ads, and advertisers pay premium for better targeting. I blogged the other day about behavioral targeted advertising, and could it get any better than knowing your every move, link, click, time spent on a site, seconds you watch any video? Google already knows every search click, email, video you see, through analytics they know up and downstream clicks to most sites, and now they will truly have all the insides. Granted that your identity should still be private, but your actions and behavior is not.

Need to see it now? Check out all these screenshots.

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