World: r3wp

How new WebOS (Palm Pre) is going to work - http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/02/palm-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-webos-technical-details.ars#

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/02/24/apple_releases_public_beta_of_safari_4_browser.html

New Safari beta with some eyepopping features.

Dubbed 

Nitro," the engine in Safari 4 is said to run JavaScript 4.2 times 
faster than Safari 3."


4.2 times. That's a lot! I'm wondering, why they did it so bad at 
first?

Safari 3's javascript engine is supposed to only be a bit slower 
than Chrome's V8, so I think it's only in extreme cases that it's 
faster.

wow, it's pretty slick. just installed it.

Btw. that link make my Safari eat all CPU.

http://rebol.hmkdesign.dk/files/safari4.png

Beware if you publish which sites you read...

interestingly, the URL bar looks _exactly_ like one of my earlier 
skin attempts for the R3 GUI :-)

why they did it so bad at first?

 - they didn't, it's just that the WHOLE world has been up to optimizing 
 JS interpreters in the last two years.

except Microsoft. It was more important for them to get Songsmith 
out on time.

well, the faster JS gets, and the easier creating web apps gets, 
the more MS loses "dominance". so it's obvious they don't want to 
help ;) but they have to keep IE from losing market share, so they 
can't do nothing either.

and now this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/24/microsoft_gazelle_browser/


The Gazelle technology would be slower than the current IE, holds 
an entire operating system for sandboxing. Could things possible 
be going in a more wrong direction for webbrowsing?

they should probably realize, that like IBM, their time is up. (but 
like IBM, they're going to be around and profitable. just give up 
the world domination thing.)

If all goes well, they'll fizzle out and the world quietly moves 
on, i.e. back on track.

One day people will realize, that it's a bad idea to build applications 
within a browser, and then all this browser war is over. :-) (And 
I at the same time have a feeling, there's a slight chance, I'm wrong, 
and everything will end up in browsers. I hope, it's not become that.)

Geomol, without ReBrowser to lead the way, in 5 years we will be 
doing 10% better webapps, just by using 8 times more CPU. :-)

or 40% worse, if we use MS technology. ;-)

Gabriele, as painful as it is to us, the easiest way for MS to maintain 
dominance is to slowly move away from W3C even further than now. 
For IE8 and IE9 that could grow. That could get them back to their 
old dream of their own internet. As hard as I would want them to, 
I don't think they would crash and burn on that. Since it's unfair 
to compare IE to other browsers, we could risk MS creating their 
own terms now, while IE still has dominance.

So for an evil corp perspective, MS is doing the wrong thing. That's 
good for us. :-)

Geomol, I agree. And I think it will happen. The first company breaking 
out of the stupid "web-app" path, delivering a product that adds 
so much more value for customers that they use, gaining market momentum 
will win the game.

Robert, Geomol - I am not sure you are right, even if I do understand 
your message. The thing is, that the browser is not just html interpreter. 
It is nowadays a container for native technologies. JS is a glue. 
So, if HTML 5 adds video, it is done in native level, hence there 
is no reason why it should be slow, etc. It is just that so far guys 
did not agree upon media formats.

I think they will never get all the different technologies playing 
together in such a smooth way. It's just to complex, hence to expensive. 
If you can provide a solution in 1/5 of time and budget, showing 
everyone it works as good or even better, youwill win.

I think, that for the sake of the world, it is a bad news, that JS 
is getting better and better. Guys trying to claim web-apps can be 
real-time, are almost true. However - hopefully no matter how they 
try, JS (web) based app will be crappy stuff even for few years coming, 
no matter how fast they get it running, as the problem is overall 
complexity of the whole web aproach ...

See, Graham, this is why there wasn't a JavaScript group before and 
there isn't much discussion in it now: People will discuss JavaScript 
everywhere else, regardless of group topic :)

I can imagine JS group used for real development efforts, JS framework 
chat, and as such :-)

The thing is, that the browser is not just html interpreter. It is 
nowadays a container for native technologies.
And

The Gazelle technology would be slower than the current IE, holds 
an entire operating system for sandboxing.


See, the browser is becoming the OS. I just hope, people will someday 
realize, this is a bad idea. It's better to run the application in 
the OS than running the application in an "OS" on top of a browser 
within an OS.

Really? I thought that's a pretty cool idea, and than wrap it inside 
a VM running on a host OS.

:-)

:-)

It shows that nobody has thought of something useful to do with all 
the CPU power nowadays

Geomol, can you point me to the time when people realized that Windows 
was a bad idea, or that MS Office was a bad idea, or that KDE or 
Gnome were bad ideas?

Henrik, for IE to gain back market share, it has to make the existing 
sites work better than they do now; future sites do not count (FF 
had to make IE sites work after all). They can't do that; their exit 
strategy would be Silverlight (which for sure allows for better web 
apps), but I don't think they're going to win that war.

I just hope, people will someday realize, this is a bad idea. It's 
better to run the application in the OS than running the application 
in an 

OS" on top of a browser within an OS." - Ah, so REBOL was a bad idea 
after all. Who wants to run a OS (REBOL) inside another OS? Better 
to use the native services the OS provides. :-)

REBOL was (is) designed with its primary principle in mind, from 
the very beginning. The web served completly different purpose, and 
is patched over the time. The Web WILL win. We are now facing transition 
era, where to cover its inefficiency, ppl are producing tonnes of 
JS libraries, to make day work easier. And if it gets even more complex, 
you will get it shielded by visual tools, which will allow you to 
do web stuff more easily.

But, there is still a chance. REBOL was made for what it was made 
for - lightweight distributed apps. We are scrapping "the bad", and 
remedying situation with R3. Does web in general throws away bad 
ideas? Mostly not. Where situation will get more interesting is the 
compatibility. In the past, there was IE, then FF, and Opera. Now 
Apple and Google entered the game, with more significant browser 
market share. We will see, what headache all those new browser cause 
to developers - I mean - various incompatibilities between browsers. 
Not to mention mobile browser incarnations, which are often separate 
projects ...

Ah, so REBOL was a bad idea after all. Who wants to run a OS (REBOL) 
inside another OS?


As I see it, REBOL is a language with some OS-related parts. The 
Viewtop for example. But that never became a huge success. Maybe 
because it's not such a good idea with another desktop on top of 
the OS desktop?

Making REBOL a real OS directly on the hardware might be a good idea 
at some point.

Geomol, the Viewtop has nothing to do with it. REBOL file name conventions 
are different from those of the host OS (%/c/file instead of C:\file), 
it does not give you access to the OS functions directly, and it 
has its own graphic rendering engine that does not use hw acceleration 
of anything (faces in R2, GOBs in R3).

if it was just a language, you would be using directx, MFC, etc. 
on Windows, QT or the GTK or Linux, and Cocoa on OSX, regardless 
of whether you're writing the Viewtop or a little game.

Gabriele - wrong - Qt is not native toolkit. You consider it being 
one, just because it is cross platform and widely adopted? By naming 
Qt, you could admit, that even View is native one, whereas VID is 
not. It does not matter that View uses its own UI elements, as much 
as GTK on Windows looked in the past (when I checked) non-native 
too (dunno if they changed it or not ...)

So, what's the native toolkit on Linux?

How do you define a toolkit "native"?

I guess, one that doesn't pretend to be a toolkit :-)

this seems to be a pretty huge announcement - http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/

Reichart, does your friend at AdaptiveAI know about any of this do 
you think? Is he a friend of Stephen Wolfram by chance?

Adrian, there was an article about it that points out how it's not 
really AI, but rather a system that can compute answers. it is surely 
a breakthrough and it's going to change our lives maybe... but that 
is sort of like google, in that it is a support tool for intelligence, 
not intelligence. that is, it is a tool that intelligent beings use. 
so, AI systems will find things like Google and Wolfram Alpha extremely 
useful, because they allow independent learning (without humans having 
to teach).

I didn't mean to imply that it was AI - I don't know if what AdaptiveAI 
uses "real" AI despite their name (though it's hard to tell from 
the info on the site). I was just thinking that they might use similar 
approaches and was curious to know if Reichart's friend who works 
there was possibly an acquaintance of Stephen Wolfram's.

OK, I'll sit and wait for the revolution to happen :-)

Wolfram has to have good PR - even our main Czech news portal is 
reporting on it :-) There was even link to already existing - http://tones.wolfram.com