Today's links for 9/25/2009

IE 8 Runs 10x faster with google chrome frame, but, of course, M$ is saying GCF is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.  Oh please.  However I do enjoy how Google is embarrassing M$ with this plugin.

Comments roundup:

Via slashdot, by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF: 

quote>Looks like Google are going to try and beat Microsoft at their own game: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

I've seen several people mention this in the last mention of Google's plug-in as well. I don't understand and I have to wonder if the people saying this know what the strategy they're referring to is. The concept of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is to comply with a standard interoperably until you are popular. Then extend the standard in a non-interoperable way, counting on your popularity and the new functionality to drive adoption. Then, extinguish the competition by utilizing the standard ubiquitously and in a non-interoperable fashion so that anyone who does not have access to the proprietary extensions you added, is removed from the market.

So for IE the strategy was to implement HTML and other technologies interoperably until IE was very popular, then extend HTML with nonstandard elements and rendering and add ActiveX for more functionality no one else could use. Then extinguish competition by building lots of tools and that rely upon the proprietary version and relying on Web developers to target IE's broken version of HTML instead of the actual standard.

So I'm trying to understand how people think Google is employing this strategy. They are embracing IE, sort of by implementing Web standards within it. How do people think Google is going to extend those Web standards in a proprietary way? Do they mean by building proprietary Web applications that use the standards? Do people actually think Google's strategy is to make Google apps really popular and then break compatibility with non-chrome browsers by making them no longer use Web standards? Won't that be hard while maintaining backwards compatibility especially since they're using an OSS browser? I suppose this is possible, but I don't see why people would assume it is Google's strategy.

So basically, while I see that Google is extending IE to use Web standards, I don't see this as a likely part of an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. Nothing stops Microsoft from creating a better implementation of Web standards in IE's rendering engine and out competing Google's plug-in and they have a lot of advantages if they do decide to compete. Rather, this is Google managing to chip away at MS's anti-competitive use of IE and make MS actually compete fairly a little more, pretty much the opposite of Google trying to kill fair competition which is what the EEE strategy is all about.