It seems to me that he appears to be new, and relatively unskilled.

I also think you’ve hit home with a key point here - “We are in a world where browser development occurs at an absolutely glacial pace, at least as far as the bulk of the installed base goes, compared to hosted application development.”

This is completely true and in a single line voids Joels entire idea.

Thanks for the article!

There’s a factor in Web applications that is not going to change very much within the near future and that is the latency of the network. Shipping a number of javascript files (or doing a lot of requests in general) will make your web application to appear to be slow when someone how is a few thousand miles away uses your web application.
For example the latency from Europe to the US is usually between 100 and 200 ms (one way !) . It’s very unlikely that this latency will become much better because the speed of light is the limit at the end.
The latency even limits your up and download speed because TCP does handshaking.
Such an application would also never work very well on an device such as the IPhone. The latency on such a device is even higher and the bandwidth is very limited.

Also Moore’s law is coming to end and im not sure whether it ever was valid for the available bandwidth.

From a non technial point of view it’s also pretty clear that users will quickly go away from sites which are slow in the beginning. Those sites will never take off.

Regards,
Markus

You are expanding the world of developers in your mind so that is much bigger than in reality and have cut out an immense number of people.

The only way to fast track improvements in browsers is if every influental products stop supporting last year’s browser, which will never ever happen in a competitive market. Backward compatibilty is a feature

Oh, and Joel is talking crap

.t

Sadly I’m not as optimistic about browser competition. Even if there is a ton of browser competition, who cares? How long has it taken for Firefox to get even 15% market share in the US? We still need to support the crap browsers we have today for a long, long time.

Firefox has had developer mindshare for years, so I’m not sure where you are getting the ‘FireFox will become larger than IE within some 2-10′ months. Another way to look at it is that Firefox has already converted all users who are willing and capable to make the switch. Now we have to wait for everyone else to die or get new machines, and sadly that takes a long, long time.

Ryan

First of all you’re talking about startups, this new SDK doesn’t necessary have to come from a startup all though I realize Joel did mention it…

All though it is more likely that it emerges from s startup. Though not all startups are in trouble, we’re doing bootstrapping in addition to professional investors meaning we can basically go on FOR EVER without going Chapter 11. And we cover A LOT of ground EVERY DAY…!

The second assumption you’re doing is more crucial I think, since browser development has been slow the last 7 years you assume it’ll be slow the next 7 years. That is just plain wrong! The reason why browser development has been slow for 7 years was because IE crushed Netscape about 7 years ago which made them basically monopolize the browser market unless you count Opera’s 7 percent. This made the ROI on browser development for MS was basically evaporating, everyone HAD to use their “crappy monopolized browser” anyway…

Today the story is totally different, EVERYONE KNOWS that the browser is going to be the next “battleground for world domination” including MSFT…!

First of all you’ve got Opera with it’s 7%, second you’ve got Apple moving at the speed of LIGHT with Safari (7%), but most important of all you’ve got _FireFox_ which basically must feel like a Napalm bomb for the strategists at MSFT now adays…!

In fact the IE7 was started on as a “fire hose” ( funny to stop FireFox from eating up their ENTIRE market and since the browser OBVIOUSLY is an extremely important part of MSFT’s dominance towards Ubuntu and Mac OS X they WILL continue developing it. In addition both Safari and FireFox are now fighting for world dominance on the browser market meaning that the “turtle race” we’ve seen for the last 7 years WILL emerge into a “cheetah race” for the NEXT 7 years…

In fact according to our weblogs FF is BIGGER than IE for developers. About 5-10 percent LARGER than IE is FF…

Now these are developers meaning not your average “grandma” but everybody “knows” that every developer brings 500 end users to the table…
Meaning FireFox WILL become larger than IE within some 2-10 months on average scale (if it isn’t already)
This will force MSFT into considering building a better browsing experience which again will force Apple and Mozilla to start moving even faster and so on…
A healthy competitive market (FINALLY!) again in the browser world after 7 years in the “dark ages”…

Just my 2cents…

Thomas