I predicted that Chrome would eat into Firefox market share. Turns out that didn’t happen, at least according to StatCounter.

Chrome hit 1% share pretty much on launch day, then stayed there. Presumably a lot of people tried it then went back to Firefox/IE.

I’ve been using Chrome as my main browser since it launched and I’ve not found any rendering problems to speak of so I guess the lack of interest must be related to it’s non existent extensibility model. Use Roboform? Not with Chrome you don’t!

As a developer I can see the problem with supporting plugins – you have no control over them and a badly written one can kill your application, damage your users’ data and leave them with a bad feeling about your app. On the other hand it’s expected these days that browsers are extendable, especially by the power users that Chrome will appeal to.

There’s also inertia to consider – you have to give people a compelling reason to swap. I happen to like the Chrome UI, speed and general usability over Firefox but I’m also not a big plugin user (although I do miss the Google toolbar and I’m baffled as to why it’s functionality isn’t built into Google’s own browser).

So I guess no extensibility and no other features to make up for it’s absence == people sticking with Firefox. For now at least.

I’m in the fortunate position of getting to visit a few tradeshows now and again. It’s fun, but most of the time there’s a lot of bigger, faster, better than before happening and not much real innovation.

This year though 3D TVs seem to have exploded, seemingly out of nowhere, from the labs and into… well, if not production then at least “tradeshow demo” status.

We’ve all seen the red/blue glasses and if you’ve ever been to a IMAX 3D showing you’ll know what a professionally produced 3D image can look like.

The glasses are a PITA though – that and the associated increases in production costs are why it’s never really taken off. It’s even worse if you wear spectacles for normal viewing, the 3D glasses are just uncomfortable on top of normal specs.

So what’s changed? Well recently I saw a 42” flat screen projecting 3D images with a real sense of depth (both into and out of the screen). I wasn’t wearing special 3D glasses and I was in a group of people who could all see the effect from a fairly wide viewing angle (not as wide as a normal picture, but you didn’t have to be spot on the target to see the effect). Hyundai are actually selling a TV using this technology in Japan (pictured).

So the display technology is maturing to the point where it’s becoming feasible – that’s point one.

Now look at production. Essentially to make 3D content you need two viewpoints. They don’t have to be separated by much - you only need the distance between your own eyes - but it’s still two cameras. More than that, it’s 2 sets of film to sync up and edit which just takes time.

Until you go digital.  Now your equipment is (relatively) tiny, it’s cheaper than ever before and keeping the footage in sync is far simpler. So using 2 cameras to get a stereoscopic viewpoint is perhaps not so crazy any more.

It’s even easier with animated movies, you just render it twice and move the “camera” between runs – your only cost there is render time (another thing that’s getting cheaper and cheaper as technology matures)

So will we all be watching 3DTV this year? No – but in 5 years? I wouldn’t bet against it. We’ve already got Hollywood producing 3D movies this year so the content is on the cards. The pieces are in place, they just need to come together…

This is probably going to be the first of many rants about the drive to make everything possible "mobile". Just because you can, doesn't mean you should... At CES a couple of years ago the industry buzz was around mobile video - ways to deliver it, devices for consuming it, stores to buy it etc etc.

Clearly I'm not "in the know". I don't have any access to sales figures or forecasts so I'll have to go on common sense: Does anybody spend money on downloading an episode of lost/desperate housewives/big brother/whatever to watch in jerk-o-vision on a crappy 320*240 screen, when they could just wait a couple of hours and watch it on the 40" telly at home? Really? Sure, I could see myself catching up on the news or watching a podcast if I've got an hour to kill but those services are essentially free. Plus I don't care about the quality too much. Actually spending money on a mobile download though? I just don't get it.

Prediction time: Mobile TV will not be the killer app that lights up the 3G airwaves and makes the world a better place! Just like WAP it won't go away, because its here now so why not keep it around, but I don't see it growing.

This assumes portable playback devices stay as limited as they are now. If somebody invents a 3 foot wide holographic screen, all bets are off but until then the mobile viewing experience will just remain painful. And yes, I know the N95 is pretty good but it's all relative - "pretty good" compared to other phones, but "woefully inadequate" compared to a decent TV.

This site has (as yet) no traffic as it's just getting started, but if one day you find this in google and happen to have spent money on a TV / video download to your phone - leave a comment and tell me why, OK?

(image courtesy of letsgomobile.org, reporting last year that the mobile video market was set to explode)

I did say I was going to seed site this with some of my earlier predictions, and the ones I could remember were wrong. Which is slightly embarassing but there you go, never let it be said I'm not honest!

In the "how wrong can you be" pile today we have Skype. When Skype first burst onto the scene VOIP was a pretty new concept - ICQ was the dominent (only?) IM client and transmitting voice on the net was a pretty hit and miss affair.

There were two competing technologies at the time, or at least I viewed them as competing. SIP was just getting started as an attempt to generate an open standard protocol for transmitting voice over IP. (actually for the pedants SIP is one of a numper of related protocols needed to make this work, but it'll do for my purpose here). Skype meanwhile was proprietory and closed.  To be fair Skype always had noticably better voice quality right from the start. I said at the time though that it's closed, proprietory nature would be it's downfall as people were starting to talk about about standards, interoperability etc.

So what happened? Well it turned out that SIP and it's associated standards were a nightmare to get working on a PC - the complicated nature of the protocol means you're into firewall hell (especially with NAT) and the voice quality of PC based SIP clients remains pretty poor even now (IMHO, obviously). Skype meanwhile has evolved to the point where it "just works" and is capable of better voice quality than my landline on a good day.

SIP didn't die - it's used in enterprise level VOIP applications, inside corporates and big telcos. There's probably a fair chance your international phone traffic is carried by VOIP using something like it. At that level interoperability is pretty important, so adhering to a standard becomes a real necessity and the networking / firewall problems can be resolved by people who know what they're doing and hardware designed to take it.

Meanwhile for the home user who just wanted to talk and didn't care about standards, skype offered an easy to use, good quality and free product which shows no sign of dying out.

Perhaps this is a lesson in "perspective". I was right about skype from a business perspective, in that I don't see corporates rushing to deploy skype across their desktops (I'm sure some do, but I reckon they're the exception rather than the rule). I wasn't thinking like a consumer though, so overall I got it wrong.

Google Chrome should need no introduction. In the past few days the buzz on the net has been about nothing else and I'm not going to repeat everything that's been said about it here. Put simply, Chrome is a brand new browser from Google, based on the open source and standards compliant Webkit engine. There are a bunch of other cool things going on under the hood that make it pretty compelling technically but that's not really what I want to look at here.

I'm trying it out and so far I like what I see. It's fast - really fast - seems stable and has some lovely UI touches. It does need some plugin support and I'm amazed they didn't integrate google bookmarks into it but for a version 1 product it's remarkably complete.

From the perspective of this site though the question is: Will Chrome overtake firefox / IE as the browser of choice?

Actually that's an almost impossible question to answer because generic browser stats are impossible to find so working out which one is more popular isn't easy. It depends on the site's target audience - sites concerned with web development will be 85% firefox but apple.com is probably 85% Safari! 

I think I can make a few assumptions though. To start with I think that firefox is used, by and large, by people who actually know it exists. By that I mean people who are interested in technology or the internet at large and are comfortable with experimenting on their PC. The archetypical "Power user" if you will.

There are an awful lot of other people out there who just use the browser that came with their PC - IE on a Windows box and Safari on the Mac. Those people will be harder to reach because by their nature they're not interested in changing something that already works for them.

Then there are corporates, who are a law unto themselves. Some won't touch firefox because it's not supported by MS. Some won't touch IE because of percieved security holes. Some don't care.

Chrome is really good, especially for a version 1 product and it can only get better with time. So here's my prediction: Chrome will eat significanty into the Firefox ("power user") market. If you own a website, give it 3 months and you'll see Chrome eating into firefox in your browser stats. I don't think it'll dent IE much, not because it's worse than IE but because google have some work to do in convincing IE users to switch.

And Safari? Google need to make a mac version first!

Microsoft Silverlight is, from the consumer's point of view Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash. It enables very pretty, very rich user experiences on websites, effectively letting web applications have the power and sophistication usually reserved for the thick clients.

Flash is well established in the web world so to some extent Microsoft are playing catchup with silverlight. I'm talking about Silverlight 1.1 / 2.0 here - the one we (developers) were all waiting for. Silverlight 1.0 was basically a technology preview that had as much in common with Silverlight 2 as Javascript has with Java.

There is one single and very simple reason why Silverlight will go places: Developer adoption. Developing in Flash requires learning a whole new toolset. Silverlight enables any C# coder to use their existing skills and development environments to create web content. No messy HTML, no javascript, no page postbacks and stateless environments. Well, mostly. Running in a browser gives you some limitations and XAML is a bit crazy at times but at least it's all within a pretty familiar conceptual framework. (If you're a developer reading this, ScottGu's blog is a good place to start)

There's some incredible technology behind it in terms of how they've managed to take the 30-odd MB .NET Framework and fit all the useful bits into a 2.5MB browser dowload. That's not the point of this post though. The question is - will Silverlight take off, or will it languish forgotten in the dusty technology archives?

A few thoughts:

1) We won't see entire applications done as huge silverlight downloads. Not in this version. A complex business app will still be better off as a thick client. Plus in it's current form (beta 2 as I'm writing this) it's still a bit rough around the edges. I'm looking forward do the day when we will be able to do that but my gut says it's a few versions away.

2) Because it's instantly accesisble to developers we'll start seeing it crop up in all sorts of places - as non-web developers realise they can create web content they'll start using it more. I can see it in internal corporate intranets.

3) The need for a supported runtime player could really hurt it. In that sense it's no worse than flash, but flash has had the time to become adopted on all the major platforms - in fact it's one of the few "essential" plugins you really need when setting up a new machine. MS need to keep up the runtime support if they want to break Adobe's grip on that space. 

If you hadn't guessed, I'm quite excited by it. Personally I'm not in love with how we do web development today - I think we've stretched a whole bunch of unsuitable technologies to breaking point in order to get where we are now. We need a new techology to take us forward and Silverlight might just be it.

The impetus has to come from developers though - I don't think users care how their experience is delivered as long as it works. So Silverlight will become another plugin you need to download in order to make things go. It'll probably become as popular as flash in time but if it was going to be the backbone of "Web 3.0" (or whatever idiot name the marketing types come up with) then pretty much everybody developing web apps now would have to stop and start again in Silverlight. Which ain't going to happen.

The final verdict: Great technology, will become adopted but won't set the world on fire. Yet.