It is nearly 10 years since the event that sparked dotcom investment mania: the August 1995 initial public offering of Netscape Communications, the company that created the first internet browser.
Quickly overtaken by Microsoft, Netscape was bought less than four years later by America Online and has seen its share of the browser market shrink to about 2 per cent.
It is ironic, then, that ideas hatched at Netscape are helping to advance a fresh round of innovation on the internet and that Google, Microsoft's newest adversary, is one of the first beneficiaries.
The internet browser was the platform on which a generation of dotcom businesses was launched. For consumers, however, the experience has not always been a pleasurable one. Waiting for a web page to load, even with a broadband connection, can be tedious.
Each request for more information, or each step in an online transaction, requires a new web page to be downloaded.
The lack of immediacy has turned the browser into a virtual bottleneck, making any action on the internet disjointed and limiting the sort of experiences that digital businesses can create for their online customers.
That is where some of Netscape's ideas from the late 1990s are starting to come into play. Through a computer language called JavaScript, the company started to think about ways of planting a greater degree of intelligence inside browsers.
Along with new communication protocols, this would partly automate the flow of information from the internet and create more responsive browsers.
"Our original intent with JavaScript was to enable client-side applications that did not have to reload pages from servers to respond to user input, and that offered a rich graphical toolkit to script authors," says Brendan Eich, the Netscape developer who created the language.
The idea, however, ran aground during the browser wars with Microsoft, as parts of the technology were adopted as standard to all browsers and others fell behind. The result was "premature standardisation, fragmentation and developer frustration," says Eich. It has taken Google and a handful of other online innovators to show how far things have progressed.
Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of the search engine company, enthuses over what he calls the "technological breakthrough" represented by Google Maps, a service that was launched in test form earlier this year.
Call up a map, and the software automatically fills in an area beyond that shown on the screen: scroll in any direction and the new parts of the map come into view, avoiding any delay that would come from sending a new request to the server.
Big progress
Several things have happened to make this sort of advance possible. One is a question of time: the various technology standards that needed to be embedded in browsers to make these more sophisticated internet-based applications work have only been around for the past year or so, says Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, a photo-sharing website.
"We've been waiting to use a lot of these technologies for a long time," he says.
The experimentation of a prominent company such as Google has certainly added to the recent wave of interest among web developers. Also, the new movement received a push earlier this year when a name was coined for it: Ajax, an acronym that alludes to a number of the technological elements that are involved.
While web developers argue over the accuracy of the term, and whether parts of the Ajax technology package are replaceable, it has at least provided a banner under which the supporters of more sophisticated web-based applications can rally.
Early adopters of the technology claim that it has led to a greatly improved customer experience, though such claims remain subjective. Flickr, which entered a crowded market, owes much of its success to the way it has used Ajax-like technologies to allow users to find and sort their pictures more easily, says Butterfield. "It gives a much greater return on the user's time."
Udi Manber, CEO of A9, the search engine owned by Amazon.com, adds that companies such as his have barely scratched the surface when it comes to exploring the potential of the technology. Start typing a word into the search box on one of A9's test pages, for example, and the search results automatically reorder themselves in real time, anticipating the user's request before it is even completed.
As online applications such as this become more responsive, they could start to reduce the need for software applications that run on a user's PC. Schmidt compares this to the debate that raged in the technology world a decade ago about so-called "thin clients" stripped-down terminals that could draw on centralised servers for data storage and processing power.
His employer at the time, Sun Microsystems, once hoped to use such machines to circumvent Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop PC.
Applications
Could Google or some other company one day produce internet-based applications to rival those of Microsoft for example, by giving users access to a word processor and unlimited storage on centralised servers?
Schmidt plays that possibility down. Applications running in a browser will never be able to draw on the full resources of a PC that an operating system can, he says.
Some of the flaws that have been inherent in internet-based applications, however, are starting to fall away. For any company that lives on the web, says Manber, the sum of all these small advances in user experience will be significant. When your customer is at the end of a mouse, he adds: "Seconds count."
- Financial TimesGulf News
