A Flash Browser On the Horizon? Monday 2006-08-21
Is the next browser generation based on on a Flash platform. This article by Matthew David at InformIT, may lead you to think so.
Here is a slightly modified version of his “Lorem Ipsum” demo case for presenting HTML or rather any XML content markup, styled by CSS. Both the XML and CSS are external files, brought together by a short Actionscript in the Flash movie. Both can easily be changed, wihtout touching the SWF. Read the article and draw your own conclusions!
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Sunday 2006-09-03
Flash being able to handle HTML/XML/CSS is interesting, and a lot of cool things can be done with that functionality, but having a full browser written in Flash seems pointless.
Something about that feels like a Java interpreter written in Java.
Sunday 2006-09-03
Hmm … Yes, as a first impression that may be true. It’s not exactly comparable though. The Java interpreter needs a Java interpreter to run, while a Flash movie needs the Player.
The Player runs, as any executable, on top of the operating system, using its services, or indirectly in a host application, e.g. as a plugin to a web browser.
If we forget about the well spread browser plugin, and only look at the Flash “movie” as just another rich fat presentation layer, we may well think browser. It has much of what’s needed for enriched data presentation, such as capabilities for networking, XML and CSS. And then of course the animation, video and sound presentation.
Adobe aims at Flash desktop and mobile applications. It may be overkill, but I think we’ll see something like that.
I’d prefer a Java based browser though. I have written a couple, using Swing and for a very simplistic browser presenting formatted text and GIF/JPEG images, I believe it takes some 10-15 lines of code.