Well the moment I've been dreading has finally arrived. The Microsoft IE team has announced that IE 8 will include an important new feature that is not standard to Ajax: The ability to update the navigation log using JavaScript.As Waldek Mastykarz said in his blog Innovation Matters, "What concerns me is the fact, that it will be supported in IE8 only." You got it; Microsoft has drawn first blood in what will be the next browser war. As Microsoft introduces new features the Firefox team will be faced again and again with two questions:
- "Do we implement everything Microsoft does or do we pick and choose?"
- "Do we innovate through a standards process or do we choose to implement first and standardize second?"
The answer to these questions will determine whether or not Firefox falls in line with Microsoft or asserts itself as a leading browser provider. The outcome seems obvious to me: No self respecting open source team will allow Microsoft to dictate its technical direction.
The Firefox team might implement this new navigation feature for Ajax applications, but it won't implement everything Microsoft chooses to add to each new version Internet Explorer. As a result Microsoft IE and Firefox will diverge to the point that Ajax applications will no longer be portable across these two leading browsers.
The downfall of DHTML, a lack of consistency across browsers brought about the first Browser Wars of the mid and late 1990's, will be exactly the same downfall for Ajax. Microsoft and Firefox are about to rekindle the Browser Wars and its the developers and end-users who are going to suffer.
This only confirms in my mind that plug-in technologies provided by a single vendor (e.g. Flash, Curl, Silverlight, Java) are the only viable RIA solutions in the years to come. Microsoft and Mozilla can innovate and diverge all they want, the RIA plug-in solutions will be able to adapt quickly and effectively protect and encapsulate applications inside their own runtimes.
Ajax is dead RIA walking.
