What's happening in the web and mobile industry?

Also known as: The battle for the Realtime Hardware Accelerated web

Contenders:
WebGL vs Flash-hw-accel vs Microsoft Silverlight

As always with the world wide web, there are a bunch of large companies and organizations that compete and plunder and behave like pre-school kids.

What is new in 2010 is the fact that smartphones are becoming more of a standard, also that some people skip buying computers because smartphones can do everything on the web (mostly). The border between mobile and stationary is being heavily blurred out.

This trend will definitely continue and really take effect in 2010. The iPhone isn't new anymore, it's a set standard, and as such Android and Nokia's Maemo are set to compete for the consumers in this arena. Who will win?

The outfit that makes the programmers want to program for their device. So far this has meant that you have to dwell into various API's that are usually proprietary with the iPhone as the worst beast of them all even requiring an encryption key (something that took me 4 months to get from Apple because they're paranoid ignorant bastards).

Less idiotic is Android, but because of it's overly moronic non-standard Java GUI system it too is horribly single-platform *vomit*. Now Microsoft has a pretty open mobile platform, but they're going out of the market (yay!), and their OS is crap anyway and not up to standard. This is true as well for Symbian which will not break much new ground in the smartphone arena.

No, my hopes are out for Nokia's Linux-based Maemo system which proves to be the most open system yet, with a solid company behind the hardware and software. The new N900 is still just a proof of concept device that many won't end up buying, but I see it more as a software development platform which in feature-richness and simplicity for the developer will be quite grand. The results will be utilized in phones and devices to come. This is if you want to code natively for it, which considering the fact that it has support for "make" and a GNU codebase is very attractive.

However, many programmers will during 2010 choose NOT to code natively and will still be able to target more than one platform with graphics-heavy applications like games and design apps. How?

The answer is short and sweet: WebGL

What is this then? It's a truly platform-independent Javascript API that enables hardware accelerated graphics. Think Flash, but not proprietary; think 1080p graphics in 60Hz in your browser regardless of Operating System;

First let's look at the implementation planning status on the PC (et. al)
Confirmed browser status for WebGL:
- Microsoft: no
- Mozilla: yes
- Google (chrome): yes
- Opera: yes
- Safari (OSX): yes

About Microsoft: What do you expect from these shareholder-pleasing morons, they're still implementing CSS properties from 5 years ago and have a management that care NULL about this and more rather want to crush SAP (and or google) and piss on everybody as much as possible along the way, no they're pushing single-platform tools as usual (read: Silverlight). Don't be surprised though if near the end of 2010 they present a new Wonderful technology that only they could have invented: "WebDX" - DirectX for the web! Ok, a bit off-track here.. sorry..

Now on the mobile side it's still only N900 that supports it but Google Android might as well.

A year back there was an incident at Computex (I think it was) where Microsoft had Asus remove a "too cool" Eee PC from the exhibition floor because it outclassed the windows XP and win7 machines by a factor 10 to 1 in battery time and CPU power and made Microsoft look bad: this platform was and is called Qualcomm Snapdragon (ARM-cpu powered) and is the powerhouse in the new Google Phone. Long battery time, fast CPU, 3D realtime graphics. We'll see more of this and I'm pleased to see Qualcomm get this out in the wild.

In short: we'll see web-based rich content on both desktop and multiple mobile devices, so far the best effort for taking the web (not just one company's territorially over-urinated API) to the next level.

You might not see it right away, but WebGL could be the nail in the coffin for flash and silverlight if it is supported enough.

(Adobe can't code anyway... closed-source losers...)