Mac OS X Tiger: a new dawn of the browser war

By at 4:13 pm Friday, Jul 9

In this week's NTK Danny O'Brien breaks the most exciting -- and underreported -- news about the forthcoming version of Mac OS X, called "Tiger":
Why have so few people noticed the key element of Tiger? Dashboard provides javascript access to some safe operating system stuff, like drawing primitives on the window canvas. And then, when you load the gadgets up *in Safari*, you get the same access. Meanwhile, Apple made a deal with Opera and Mozilla the same week to add enough to the browser plugin API to provide the same javascript objects on other platforms and browsers. And they all forked off from the W3C last month to set their own standard committee, WHAT-WG. For creating web applications. Just like Joel Spolsky was asking them to do. So we have low-level (but not insecure) javascript access to the desktop, an open (but non-W3C) standard, and cross-platform plugins to support it. DON'T YOU PEOPLE UNDERSTAND? It's BROWSER WARS II - ELECTRIC BOOGALOO!
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Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

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