Microsoft and Google look into the future of HTML5
During last Tuesday’s New Game Conference held in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, game and software developers debated the future of HTML5. The event was sponsored by Google and Microsoft and those attending the conference discussed the many promises and unresolved flaws of HTML5 while also debating the future of Web apps and their emerging open standard.
In a rare collaborative effort between Microsoft and Google, the two giant arch-enemies joined forces to sponsor an event in which the future of HTML5 was to be discussed and debated. Another important topic for discussion was the emerging open standard for Web applications.
Held last Tuesday at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco, game developers and several representatives from some of the world’s major software and web development companies gathered to explore the possibilities of HTML5 as a gaming platform. But the focus soon went beyond the online gaming industry and turned to the development of business applications.
At the moment, through their Chrome Web Store and other projects such as the Native Client, Google is pushing every effort to make the Web a better platform for gaming and other browser makers are following suit and coming up with solutions of their own. For example, Mozilla has been putting a lot of effort in the development of APIs that will enable gamers to use joysticks with browser games and which are able to constrain mouse movements to prevent those jerky movements from taking users out of the game and into other tabs or applications. Microsoft on the other hand is betting on the Web app space with an apparent major commitment to the new Web standards for Windows 8.
The problem is that actual results have fallen short of expectations. Back in 2009, Google had claimed that the Web was to become the dominant platform for software development. However, it seems that the reality couldn’t live up to all the hype, as Seth Ladd, Google developer advocate noted that after all this time, finally now more than 50% of all installed browsers are able to play the HTML5 version of Angry Birds. So if the Web is winning the battle of software development, it has only started to do so recently.
But, all in all and despite the slow progress, it looks as though the technology is finally coming together. Soon the next version of the WebGL specification (announced in March 2011) will be released and with it some of the initial concerns about security should be resolved.
The other glitches to be overcome for the Web platform is to finally be able to match the native app experience, and this one is as much a technical challenge as a social one. While Apple has successfully managed to acclimatise users to its App Store model, Mozilla and Google have been struggling to establish norms of behaviour for Web apps, and it seems there is still much work to be done.
In short, the conclusion is that yes, HTML5 is great, and its future still looks bright and promising, but a lot of work still needs to be done to reach its full potential and ensure its usability across all platforms, Web apps and emerging technologies.
