Web 2.0 Summit: The Browser Is What Matters (InformationWeek) [LWN.net]

Web 2.0 Summit: The Browser Is What Matters (InformationWeek)

Posted Oct 22, 2009 23:54 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
Parent article: Web 2.0 Summit: The Browser Is What Matters (InformationWeek)

Unless Cheome OS focuses on solid highend graphics, it's dead in the water. Nobody
except Internet businesses and Linux nerds think that the browser is all people use. The
vast majority of computer play games. Real, quality, triple A games, not TuxRacer. Kids,
college students, and even many of the "younger professionals" out play at least a few
games. The entire drive the industry has in more powerful consumer hardware focuses
around games. Much of the iPhones success is from it's gaming ability. Until a Linux based
device is capable of satisfying the needs of modern games, it will never sarisfy the needs of
real people.

Web 2.0 Summit: The Browser Is What Matters (InformationWeek)

Posted Oct 23, 2009 3:53 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (4 responses)

Nobody except Internet businesses and Linux nerds think that the browser is all people use.

The funny thing is, I could say almost exactly the opposite, based on observing my non-nerd friends and relatives! They spend their computer time in the browser almost exclusively, except for some small wordprocessing stuff, and a browser-based app could handle that, too. None of them see games as a particularly important application for computers. Most of them don't play any computer games at all.

Web 2.0 Summit: The Browser Is What Matters (InformationWeek)

Posted Oct 23, 2009 14:21 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

I second eru's comment. Games are unimportant to the vast majority of the people I interact with. But perhaps it's a generation gap, as it so happens that I mostly interact with people over the age of 25.

I also second that comment

Posted Oct 23, 2009 15:38 UTC (Fri) by dbruce (guest, #57948) [Link] (1 responses)

People who spend a lot of time with computers and software get a distorted picture of what the general public really does. The browser really *is* what the majority of casual computer users spend nearly all their time in. I would guess that less than 50% of the population has ever installed any software application, less than 10% has opened the case to replace any hardware, and less than 1% has ever installed an operating system.

AFAICT, people usually buy computers and use whatever hardware and software comes with the system. If anything needs to be changed, they either pay the service department at the local appliance store to do it for them, or drag in the unlucky family member who serves as the "computer guy" (someone like the graphics-requiring game players mentioned above).

I also second that comment

Posted Oct 25, 2009 11:59 UTC (Sun) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

And almost all the games they play are something running in Flashplayer.
There are sites dedicates to Flash games (mostly for teenagers I guess)
and social web sites like Facebook also provide (over-the-net multiplayer
= social) Flash games.

Triple-A (especially single player) games sound more like a nerd thing
like all non-casual gaming.

Web 2.0 Summit: The Browser Is What Matters (InformationWeek)

Posted Oct 29, 2009 9:42 UTC (Thu) by stevan (guest, #4342) [Link]

Yet one of the accusations against greater mass uptake of Linux as a standard OS is "lack of
applications." It seems that a lot of the cloud offerings are even more selective about app
availability, yet there is an assumption that this aspect is no longer the issue it is seen to be,
in a slightly different context. I don't see how this can be both true and false.

If, on the other hand, the proposition is a greater variety of productivity sources, that makes
greater sense, but western business doesn't seem to see things like that. <ABBA> The
winner takes it aaaaaaaaaaal </ABBA>

Web 2.0 Summit: The Browser Is What Matters (InformationWeek)

Posted Oct 23, 2009 4:14 UTC (Fri) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]

Is Chrome OS trying to be anything more than a tablet/netbook OS?

Web 2.0 Summit: The Browser Is What Matters (InformationWeek)

Posted Oct 23, 2009 9:20 UTC (Fri) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

Google is proposing O3D for high performance 3D graphics on the web: http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/

This will be accessible both from JavaScript and Google Native Client: http://www.vizworld.com/2009/06/google-welds-native-clien... and http://ostatic.com/blog/google-forging-ahead-with-native-...

Since you can already play Quake using a browser plugin, I see no reason why O3D or Native Client wouldn't work for this. The issue will be uptake by game developers, but presumably once you develop for this sort of 3D / native code API, operating system differences become irrelevant so I can see this being attractive to developers as gaming moves to the web in any case.

Web 2.0 Summit: The Browser Is What Matters (InformationWeek)

Posted Oct 23, 2009 15:33 UTC (Fri) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

Nobody except Internet businesses and Linux nerds think that the browser is all people use.

The folks you hang around with may be hardcore gamers, but you should not generalize from the little subset of the population you know. Real people actually do use little more than a wordprocessor, a browser and an email program. My mum asks me about home accounting and text editing, but not about triple A games and solid highend graphics.

The best selling graphics card of the PC business is the chipset graphics of Intel - very very lowend graphics.

And the iPhone isn't known for its highend gaming ability and wasn't advertised as a portable gaming console when it entered the market. Its games are not triple A, but casual games, often with very poor graphics.

The Nintendo DS has won over the PSP and the Wii over the PS3. Seems that highend graphics isn't all that counts.