Browser Wars Redux: This Time It's the Apps 170
itwbennett writes "Yesterday's release of the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader brought to mind the bad old days of the browser wars, but with a new twist: while the app works on any iOS device, it only works on computers with Safari and Chrome. Blogger Brian Proffitt knows as well as anyone that 'this isn't a deliberate snub of the other browsers. Clearly the developers of this web app had to get it to work on Safari, because that's the only vector to get it onto an Apple device. And, since both Chrome and Safari have a shared ancestor in WebKit, it makes sense that what would work in one browser would work in the other.' But it raises an interesting question: 'If HTML5 and other web technologies are supposed to be open and standardized, then will web app developers have to continually tweak their apps in order to accommodate deficiencies or advantages between browsers, or will browsers have to constantly stay in sync with each other's features just to be able to run all the web apps out there?'"
IndexedDB vs WebSQL (Score:5, Informative)
Good lord slashdot, I was hoping to see informed technical discussion like that slashdot of old instead of scaremongering gossip over motives for the Book Store compatibility. It has nothing to do with Apple controlling Amazon, or browser wars. The HTML5 database storage spec is not fully standardized, and so chrome and safari both implement the WebSQL spec while Mozilla has chosen to go with their own IndexedDB spec.
The book store will be ported to firefox shortly as both DB implementations basically accomplish the same thing. It came out for Chrome and Safari first because Amazon wanted to circumvent Apple's in-app purchasing requirements on the iPad and that meant working with webkit first. Down the line I am sure that browser makers will eventually converge on either IndexedDB or WebSQL and that will become part of the HTML standard but for now the discrepancy is explainable purely in terms of using a non-standard technology that browser makers are still experimenting with and trying to shake out.