[Baypiggies] native GUI vs. web browser

[Andrew Akira Toulouse]

I think Microsoft should make something competitive. Maybe call it  
ActiveX! It'll be a great idea that will revolutionize computing!  
That, or expose security holes and facilitate malware for years to  
come, but really, what are the chances of that happening.

What? It's 2009? Oh.

/snark

As it turns out, Google appears to be doing something to address your  
concerns already:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client
http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

I think that Google has the advantage this time around of knowing a  
lot more about web browsers than anyone else knew way back in the day,  
and has the expertise (loads of smart people) necessary as well as the  
lessons learned from ActiveX to do it right this time. After all, Java  
has managed to do it, at least technologically - the user experience  
for applets seems to be consistently poor. I'm hoping that in whatever  
native solution comes out next (such as NaCl) there will be an easy  
way to manipulate web page content so that, for example, you could  
script web pages in Python. <script type="text/python"> would be  
awesome.

--Andy

On Dec 16, 2009, at 9:59 AM, K. Richard Pixley wrote:

> Jason Lai wrote:
>> Browser-based doesn't always mean "in the cloud" any more. Google  
>> Gears and HTML5 databases provide a means to store data locally.  
>> Maybe in the future they'll allow users to load files from their  
>> desktop without uploading it and manipulate the data using  
>> Javascript, which I think Flash can already do.
> Transparently downloadable, runnable code that can also access your  
> hard disk.
>
> Does this scare anyone else?
>
> --rich
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