You Say You Want a Web Revolution

The Netscape threat that led Microsoft to wage the browser war and cross swords with antitrust regulators around the world is — at long last — poised to become reality.

Software experts say recent innovations in web design are ushering in a new era for internet-based software applications, some of the best of which already rival desktop applications in power and efficiency. That’s giving software developers a wide open platform for creating new programs that have no relation to the underlying operating system that runs a PC.

Evidence of this evolution has been popping up everywhere in recent months, with examples that include Google’s online map rendering software and its Gmail service, Amazon’s A9 search engine and NetFlix’s DVD rental platform. All highlight a dramatic rethinking of web applications, using a programming technique dubbed AJAX (for asynchronous JavaScript and XML) that significantly improves how web pages interact with data, for the first time rivaling programs that run natively on the desktop.

By Ryan Singel

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