Redirecting

I don't use Google's Chrome browser very often, but today I did and I noticed that in the home page (that shows little square snapshots of your most visited sites), the square snapshot of the GMail login page is shown with the title "Redirecting" rather than Gmail. Just thought it was curious that happened for one of Google's own products.

Google Chrome

So apparently Google is working on it's own browser, and they have produced probably the least funny comic in history to let the world know. Apart from the technical reasons for the browser, that are trumpeted in the cartoon, I imagine the business types at Google are also interested in solving the little issue that while most of the world use Google's search platform, they mostly do it using their arch-competitor's browser (Internet Explorer). Despite extensive funding from Google, Mozilla have never had the brand presence to undo Microsoft's browser-dominance as much as Google would, no doubt, like.

Google's project is planned to be open source, make all the technical bloggers very happy people. But it's worth remembering that "open source" does not mean "democratic". We can reasonably expect Google's browser to be designed carefully around Google's services. This is a branded browser that it likely to be promoting GMail over, say, Hotmail or Yahoo, and GTalk over Skype, AIM, or Facebook's instant messaging.

But then, the chances are that even Google's brand presence will not push out IE in the near term -- how do you market a "better browser" to an end-user who doesn't know any of the technical reasons? Especially when you can't afford to stop giving the browser they're already using great support? However, a Google Browser probably could out-compete Mozilla's Firefox. (And for how long will Google continue to fund Mozilla? They are by far the biggest financial contributor at the moment.) That in turn could help Google dominate some of the competition in Web-based applications -- the losers from this might well be AOL, Skype, and Adobe.

And then there's the small matter of upcoming competition -- competing for the next generation of apps. Adobe AIR threatens to take Web applications out of the browser, and provides a rich application environment without some of the hassles of HTML. That could become a compelling story, and Adobe have a history of getting their product out to a large userbase (Flash has around a 90% install-base). And they have an online-documents suite that is a minor competitor to Google Docs, but that could easily become more compelling. So, it is very much in Google's interests to improve the HTML+Javascript experience of the browser, since that is where all of their business is based.

ALT-C, Peter Norvig's keynote

A couple of weeks ago, Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, gave the closing keynote at the ALT-C keynote. For his background reading, he spoke to Hal Abelson, who happens also to have been involved in the Intelligent Book project my PhD came out of. So, of course I was ever so interested because there was lots of common ground with my research and I had a personal link to the background. And I thought it was an entertaining talk. However, talking to a two other attendees (with backgrounds in education) in the cab on the way to the train station, they surprised me by saying they didn't find it very relevant. Well, of course you can't please everyone, but I had to ponder what it was about the talk that left them unenthused and me entertained.

I wondered if perhaps by keeping the talk non-technical, Norvig maybe ended up focusing on material they already knew. Like many AI researchers when they look at teaching technology, Norvig took Bloom's "Two Sigma Problem" as his cue. This is the "problem" that tutoring students one-to-one is much more effective than teaching them in a traditional classroom (specifically, a 1980s US high school classroom) but is also much more expensive. Rather than focus too much on technical matters, he unpacked the outcomes of Bloom's research and what it means for teaching pedagogy, and where technology might fit. This is all interesting stuff for technologists looking at educational technology, even if I'd already come to similar conclusions from reading Bloom's Two Sigma Problem paper myself. But this made me wonder -- the teachers and education researchers in the audience are probably already very familiar with Bloom and his research: he's one of the biggest names in the field. And perhaps, seeing that the keynote was by the director of research at Google, they expected to hear more about what new kinds of technology might be around the corner, how it could benefit teaching, and how to prevent technology from chewing up all their time in learning how to use and administer it?

Or maybe the two people I spoke to were just having a bad day.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)'s cunning plan?

Languages like Java and Python compile it to an intermediate semi-digested form called "p-code" or "bytecode". Google Web Toolkit (GWT) takes Java source and compiles it into cross-browser JavaScript. Effectively, GWT uses JavaScript as its p-code.

But how good is JavaScript at being a p-code? Probably not great, because it wasn't designed as one -- it was designed as a general purpose programming language. Programming languages are designed to cater for the fact that programs are written by people. So, they have lots of syntactic sugar and usability features. P-code, meanwhile, is never written by hand and so needs no usability features. P-code is something designed to be quick and easy for a virtual machine to interpret and optimise. (See any course on compilers for the sorts of changes compilers make when converting source code to an intermediate representation.)

If JavaScript was an efficient p-code language, and if the "virtual machines" for it (the browsers) were efficient, then GWT applications would perform as well as Java or .NET applications. And yet, GWT actually feels a little sluggish.

So how could Google get around this issue? Well, it's in a uniquely good position to introduce a new p-code into browsers: a proper intermediate representation of JavaScript. The new p-code would be put into Firefox first presumably. GWT would then include some code in the sites it generates to see if the browser supports this new p-code. If it does, it would ask the server for blazing fast new p-code; if it doesn't, it would ask for sluggish old JavaScript. And if GWT sites (like most of Google) were blazing fast on Firefox and sluggish on IE or Safari, it wouldn't take the other browser manufacturers long to say "we'd like some of this new p-code goodness too please".

And then Google would have moved some way towards their goal of the Web being their "universal application platform", rather than the slightly hacky, messy, not quite fit-for-purpose application platform that browsers have always been so far.

Of course all this is purely speculation...