Adobe’s love and hate for browsers

Vijay,

>Then why did Adobe choose to write Apollo outside the browser? Which clearly
> puts them On A Collision Course With Web Browsers. Here is why Adobe hates
> browsers:

You can’t understand unless you have been a RIA developer. There is better world beyond browsers, I love my browser (firefox) but I still want to create applications which, looks better, integrate with OS still under a security-sandbox and provide better user-experience (drag-drop, system-tray, rich-ui etc).

I guess, you would have realized Adobe Apollo and Dekoh are two different games.

-abdul

Abdul,

I am not disputing Apollo is attractive to Flash/Flex developers. Apollo and Dekoh are 2 different approaches, not sure what you mean by different games. UI in the browser does not mean other OS integration benefits are not available to Dekoh applications.

The thought was just around why did Adobe not leverage the huge penetration already that it enjoys in the form of 2 popular plugins.

Vijay
Dekoh

Vijay,

You asked why Adobe isn’t leveraging the huge penetration they already enjoy on the desktop. It would seem that they are. The Apollo runtime leverages Flash Player and PDF to create new classes of desktop RIAs. The install for Apollo will be powered by Flash and initiate from the browser.

My life has become increasingly less stress-filled since I stopped having to deal with browser incompatability issues that arise while developing with the traditional HTML/CSS/AJAX model. I really like the thought of testing for one platform, and only one platform. If Dekoh applications can be guaranteed to have only one specific configuration / runtime / environment to test against, then I may take a look. But, judging from your initiative to support all major browsers, I can’t see how that would be the case.

Also, in my opinion, creating an environment where you can instantiate a browser plugin within your application is just asking for trouble. What if the user doesn’t have the plugin? What if they don’t want to install it? What if they’re running Microsoft’s JRE and every time they run a Java applet it crashes?

- Zach

Zach,

If the argument is that it is better to write HTML/Javascript/AJAX/Flash application outside the browser then it is going to put Apollo at a competing position with the browser.

If your argument is just that Flash is better than AJAX, you can very well do the same in the browser (BTW, you can write Flash based applications on Dekoh). My only point is browser back button makes Flash applications in browser not work the same way users expect web applications to work.

I did not understand what you meant in the last paragraph. Dekoh does not depend on any applets, if that is what is implied. Only the one-click installer is applet based, but soon there will be a download and install alternative also.

Vijay

Vijay,

You can write Flash sites & applications that support deeplinking (therefore the back button) and search engine optimisation.. it just takes a little more thought.

I think you are mistaking the general usage of flash with the its capabilities. There applications that take advantage of the latest features to provide full image editing services, video mixing services, and word processing apps that are miles ahead of anything similar built using the AJAX methodology.

It’s just another revolution of the same wheel… the majority used to use flash to produce tragic intro screens or equally appalling timeline based sites. Then there was a noticeable shift in the quality of most flash work, helped by actionscript being used as a proper object oriented language (although this is still scoffed at by unhappy/underpaid developers), the excellent video support, and the ubiquity of the flash plugin.

Nowadays there are a lot of excellent OS flash projects around, that make it pretty easy to build a site that behaves as end users expect, yet provide a much more enjoyable/engaging user experience. For instance you can implement deeplinking using SWFAddress & full blown tracking using Google Analytics, or a custom built stats package.

It is up to the people who work with a technology to make the most of it and keep pushing what it can do. That’s where progress comes from.

Vijay,

If you were a RIA developer and know what flex and flash now does you wont make these points upto this extend. If you dont want to use the technology its upto you, dont write something about the technology without understanding the full features.

> It is hard to change user behavior.
Users would keen to adapt to the richness and easyness of the apps they dont want to use age old technologies.. so user would change their behaviour if it is easy for them and get the better what they have now

Thanks
Durai

Durai,

I am not commenting on any technology. I am only trying to analyze why Adobe chose not to be within the browser although they have such large presence inside the browser.

Vijay

Hi Vijay,
From your conversation I couldn’t understand the gist about why you raised the question of Adobe moving out of browser…

As far as I understand… Adobe is doing great job with extending their approach with not limiting to browsers only while maintaining the supremacy at Browsers… We as a developer can now create the same apps which were built for browsers as a standalone applications for end users.

Peace people

We love you

My guess:
One of the big points for Adobe AIR is
that Adobe does not have to worry
about the browsers differences when
implementing the AIR runtime, only OS
differences matter.

Otherwise: Adobe has to take care of Firefox
security model, IE6’s model, IE7’s model,…

ADG

Flex is the replacement of AJAX/CSS take it or leave it….and if Adobe decides to build Apollo outside the browser, wu says they av not done well, at least since the first realease of flex about a year ago, we are now having flex 3.0 and 4.0 is still on the way, to me nothing is wrong with their approach, why Sun had J2SE, J2ME, J2EE, and Adobe also has Flex, FlexMobile so why not FlexDesktop codenamed Apolo…my 2 cents