UM professor recaps the life of Internet Explorer, the rise of Google Chrome and more

in 1993 we never really heard the world wide web and in 1994 the only thing you could hear about is the world wide web and that was because this piece of technology called the browser was invented and the browser made it so that we could you know interact send a tracking number to fedex and so all of a sudden it was a transformative way to take this wonderful internet which had been around for many years and make it usable by just literally everybody and so the thing that that that made this possible was a a software piece of software called a web browser and there were many web browsers in 1992 93 94. 94 but the one that really made the biggest impact was one called mosaic because it was the first one that worked on windows mac and unix and and so that was open source and it was free and it was real clear that this web and the browser technology was like the future and whoever got their hands on it was going to be very very wealthy and so the team of mostly students that had built it at the university of illinois urbana-champaign uh met up with some venture capitalists from silicon valley and founded a company called netscape now they had come from a university where they'd given it away for free and and made us all want this really badly and their first goal was to get rid of the free version of the web browser and make it so that you had to pay fifty dollars for a web browser so imagine to present that you would get a phone but you couldn't surf the web you couldn't go to a www address until you paid fifty dollars to this company and bought a piece of software much like today you buy microsoft word you can't you buy a computer you can't do word processing until you buy word well they wanted to make it so that you had to buy the browser so this little company called netscape which was the people who built the free version immediately tried to sort of crowd the free version out of the marketplace and make it so that everybody had to buy a 50 browser from this company called netscape and they did that by changing the protocols and adding features and trying to sort of split us to put a wedge in and that that might have happened except for internet explorer and that's where internet explorer comes into this picture and so a lot of people like to paint microsoft is sort of the villain in any tech story but in this particular situation microsoft realized that if a commercial product web browser came out then everybody who had windows would have to pay it 99 dollars for windows and then pay 50 dollars for this web browser and this web browser company would i mean windows is gigantic and web browsers are really a tiny piece of software and for microsoft would be making these people very very wealthy so they're like we are not going to let you make a commercial product out of netscape and there's numbers they like hired a thousand people in late 1994 to build internet explorer and they actually included some of the free software that was mosaic in it they licensed it from urbana champaign and then in windows 95 there's this piece of the thing free browser called internet explorer that was internet explorer one it was part of windows 95 and it basically broke the monopoly that had not yet happened that netscape was trying to do on the browser market and and so at that point you know microsoft saved us from having to pay fifty dollars to surf the web and uh the and so that that's the start of it but then then things kind of moved on from there because it wasn't didn't take long for microsoft to crush poor little baby netscapes hopes i mean it was a startup and microsoft went from being the the sort of the protector of the invaders to being the invader themselves and they thought well okay now we sent this windows 95 out and everybody has it why don't we begin to change what it means to be the web and so they had their own microsoft unique extensions and they said please use these extensions and they were things that bound the windows operating system to web pages and and so here we are like we started with a free browser then we end up with these kind of crummy people who are trying to make money off of a paid browser at 50 bucks a pop and now we got microsoft that's got a browser that's stopped you know everyone's sort of like replaced the one before but then decided oh i'm going to make some money here and so we had a long fight right and microsoft fought to make the web a proprietary thing that you pretty much had to have a windows box to truly enjoy and so they wanted to make it so that the cool stuff like video and audio you had to be a windows person and anyone else could use the non-cool stuff and so they they went from being our savior and giving it to us for free to basically saying how when can we force this market to be our market and eliminate other operating systems and make windows be the only operating system for phones and for all these other things and so internet explorer quickly went to um for those who of of us who built software for the web um it sort of went from a hero to a goat and then a laughing stock right i mean because the things that microsoft was doing were not very technically elegant and um they were just kind of a quick up quick hack mess then like well if you do this weird thing you can play video and it didn't feel good to anybody and it uh it didn't go well and then um the whole web continued to evolve and then internet explorer did not want to evolve and so that's how it goes to being something that we sort of laugh about now and dance a little bit and say oh it's gone and uh that that ends a uh that ends a whole phase of the internet right um you kind of touched on this but something else that was mentioned in my newsroom earlier was just not that internet explorer was unsafe but it was there were a lot of hacks and there was a lot of pop-ups and things coming on so maybe talk to me a little bit about that i know that possibly sway people away and then if you can mention what kind of hap who came up kind of next after internet explorer to kind of get people to go move away from microsoft to the next new big browser yeah so there's a there's a couple of things that that happened in terms of um the annoyances that early browsers had um all of them had annoyances right all of them were switching from a a model where you would see just kind of a page and it wasn't interactive to having interactivity and javascript was the technology for microsoft it was called activex um and and what happened was that when the browser manufacturers microsoft netscape and others added interactivity the first thing that often was you that interactivity was used for was to be annoying right so one of the things that the an interactive page can do is make a pop-up and like oh here's some papa right and so you know all of us nerds we just like said whoa hi welcome to my page bang there's a pop-up right and so just because because they made it and it was supposed to be interactive we all kind of initially misused the interactivity and so it's not all on the browser manufacturers i mean we played with these things and it was annoying and then as folks tried to figure out advertising then they would you know you use a pop-up to send sent you to an ad and so it ended up with uh with sort of a a bad taste in people's mouths to the all the interactivity that was being added to all the browsers uh during that time there's a couple of things that happened to microsoft one of the things that happened was there was some lawsuits about the fact that you couldn't you shouldn't be giving away this piece of software and so you'll notice that windows does not include word and people would feel like well if you put the operating system in it has worked that's a competitive disadvantage and you should be able to put it in any word processor now of course no one puts in anything support and microsoft makes extra money when you buy word but the idea was that we had the market especially europe hadn't given up on the idea that the web browser should be an independent piece of software that didn't just come with the operating system and if you've given up put that independent piece of software in the operating system that means that whoever wants to compete with that software has to come has a disadvantage right and so there were some lawsuits that said that microsoft wasn't supposed to bundle it you'd have to like install your thing and download it and everybody of course did and so there there were a few um there's some back and forth right where where the world tried to figure out the relationship between the browser and the operating system um and in that in that time that sort of this is like 95 96 time frame in that in that time netscape's business model just kind of vanished out from under it um and so netscape was sort of falling apart they weren't making money 50 for every browser which is would have made them you know infinitely wealthy at that point and then their whole kind of model fell apart and so netscape was about to sort of go away and vanish and there was a little tiny bit a little tiny sparkle in the back of their mind that said they came from open source at their university of illinois urbana-champaign and maybe as they sort of collapse into a heap they should go back to open source and so some of the people who were part of netscape that believed in an open source created a project called netscape and so the netscape is now the mozilla foundation but it was netscape foundation i think it was mozilla at the beginning but the idea was here's this netscape browser we're ceasing to be able to be a commercial company with this how about we just give it away as open source and we take a little bit of the money that we've got and um hand it to these five or six open source people and say you know what see what you do with this thing because we're done trying to make a commercial activity happen and so there was open source netscape and there's a it's a very complex a very complex thing mitchell baker was the person who ran that foundation for its beginning and that was that kind of wasn't a great like success until they released a version of the product that had google as the main page that you would come up with so your old browser might say hi welcome to netscape or internet explorer this is a great product and microsoft is so happy that you're starting our product whereas netscape which became firefox i think mozilla firefox they're running together for but they they decided to put the google search box as the main startup page because why why would people start a browser anyway because they gotta go find something and in this time google was becoming successful and they signed a deal that said i'll take a tiny fraction of a cent every time someone clicks on that box and so all of a sudden this open source browser uh people started clicking on the box a lot and then all of a sudden this mozilla foundation became very wealthy and not only could they afford to build a free and open source browser which is our firefox today but they also had enough money to become sort of activists in terms of policy activists when it comes to freedom of the web privacy etc and they continue to do that right um and and so that firefox was sort of the great thing that sort of unified the world and all of us nerds once we kind of got rid of netscape and we went to firefox and and then you know later chrome came out now there's kind of a chrome versus firefox battle going on and apple has safari and and then there's opera and etc etc etc and so there was there's lots of sort of like new entrants into the space over time but the the third real big entrant was the open source netscape which has evolved into mozilla and firefox um that was really good information thank you um speaking of google chrome i know right now it's kind of like the leading web browser i guess talk to me a little bit about that what do you think it is about google chrome that allows it to be that kind of seems like me making an educated guess like you said marzella was already linking to google so google chrome kind of having its own website kind of sounds like a browser kind of sounds like a no-brainer but obviously you wouldn't know so just curious as to why you think there's a shift is or is this just kind of historically what happens you could be on the google google chrome can be on the top now but be at the bottom in 10 years yeah so so google chrome i think came from an urge inside of google to take more responsibility for the overall quality of experience that we enjoy in the web right so google is our search engine but for most people that's what they think the web is right and so if you are unhappy with the performance of a search or the results of a search you kind of convict the web and you convict google you're like i i'm mad i got i typed in something and i didn't get what i wanted or it took too long or whatever and so google sort of views it as you searching not just their site but then the sites you click on from there you know and so that's why their page rank is trying to put good websites that people actually like up at the top not if if you click on a search result and you hit the back button because you're so mad about that search result they want to know that they want to know that they put a website up at the top and people don't like it because then that website is going to go down because they you don't blame the bad website you blame google for showing you the website that you didn't want to see so google needed to sort of have a much better understanding of our own behaviors while we're using the web and while we're using search and what better way to see our behaviors and then alter our behaviors and then react to our behaviors than build a browser because in the browser they see every click we do they know that you they know when you're moving your cursor like wait a sec is that first one the one i want no i don't want that first one i want the second one i want the third one so by putting a browser on your computer with google chrome they could really study even better how we were using the web because if you're using not chrome they have to wait until you click on something but they but with chrome they can sort of watch everything you do you know they can are you breathing did your heart rate speed up no i'm probably exaggerating at that point so the the idea was and and you could you can go either way on this you can say well they want to know everything so they can sell you stuff or they just want you to be happy right they want you to enjoy the web and i think the truth is somewhere in between there right and so chrome became a browser they had enough money that they just you know hired 500 people say see what those people are doing let's see what firefox is doing let's make a chrome let's make our own thing and then what they had to do is they had to make chrome better than firefox because otherwise those of us who'd been grown up on firefox would not go and so they had to make it faster and fancier and better and better at debugging like for software development et cetera et cetera and so they they really not only did they match what firefox was capable of doing but they eclipsed it and we software developers we just kind of rush to it right and you know it works on macintosh and it works on windows and it's free and there and it's fast and it has really good developer tools and so we all migrated the great chrome migration um and so you know that was fun for a while and then of course as as how this whole story keeps going google's like hmm interesting we now have 40 we were nothing a year ago and now we have 40 what can we do with that how can we then hurt the other 60 in a way that we can get to 100 so and so they get so that it's like we we're trying to make the world a better place yeah that's it and then they're like oh wait we want to destroy our competitors and so what happened then is google started google chrome started doing things that we you might not notice but we software developers notice like ah google chrome's doing a little something tricky there and there and youtube site is a little slower on firefox for no apparent reason oh wait a sec we figure out that there's a little special thing in chrome that makes youtube really fast and if you're they're discriminating in a sense that firefox doesn't work as well on on youtube and so there's been kind of a backlash right of like i don't use chrome anymore i i switched to i switched from firefox to chrome because i perceived that certain videos were not loading as fast and i got tired of that and i switched to firefox and then i've switched back because i kind of feel like i was being used and and treated badly by my chrome and and so it it goes back and forth and back and forth um and and what's but what's really kind of happened is in the back and forth is that you know it's what 95 how we're 25 years ago no one has been able to kind of turn the corner from doing good and with their browser and then like oh let's eliminate all of our competition um because we kind of notice it and then we switch you get up to 40 percent and then nobody you know they kind of stop right and so uh what's happened is quietly most of the browsers are sharing some componentry within the browser right and so microsoft edge's browser was using some of the same rendering technologies that uh that firefox was using and chrome was using and so instead of basically trying to eliminate each other they without really making too much of a fuss about it they kind of coordinate so that if they want to innovate on something they all can innovate and they don't have to knock each other out from a market share perspective and so this is where internet explorer which was the weird one was replaced by internet edge and internet edge is sort of more like firefox and more like chrome and shares some much more things in common so we've stopped trying to split the world up and make us make choices based on the browser we picked and have websites that work better in one than the other it goes on in little bits but it's more about performance than it is about features and so um i think the the fact that internet explorer is uh you know 11 is going away is just this acknowledgement that it we've kind of passed the point where every we we're at the point where every single you know suppliers got to have a browser and it's going to be free and we don't need to take competitive advantage based on what our browser market share is and then try to break the community up because we have a history of noticing that and then like running as fast as possible to another browser so so you know perhaps this signals a golden age of of sort of muted competition in which browser you're using and a bit more of a you know you can use any old browser you want and the web is going to seem to be the same perform roughly the same and that's the that's the optimistic way to look at the end of the long history of internet explorer so to that point so do you think do you not believe that another type of browser can come up and be better than google or firefox or do you think that these the big three or four that we have now will kind of be here 25. well will any of these browsers that we have now be the new internet explorer that is now gone is my point or do you think like you said they're all gonna keep kind of like tabs on each other and make sure that everyone's kind of on par to a certain extent yeah so there's still there's only one real browser in the major browser in the market place that is kind of like different from the others right and that would be apple safari and so right now internet explorer used to be the different one right and then it stopped being different and apple safari is uh different as well and um it's not clear that apple really will face the need to comply and be like everybody else in the same way and i think the reason is is because apple is not just trying to split the marketplace and increase its market share i think apple has some core values uh as a company like privacy for example and so you know a lot of these browsers uh don't want you to be able to do things privately because they want to sell your activity to advertisers and so there's kind of like a a a strange alliance between horrible advertisers and the browsers and they don't want to completely shut out the advertisers and so they kind of leave their browsers somewhat vulnerable to tracking for example so that you know if you're using chrome or using edge or firefox you kind of get tracked but apple seems to not want to do that they're like you know advertisers we believe that in the long run people will become find privacy more valuable and that will lead people to apple and and i've heard people say and i don't do this myself that if if you're going to visit a website that you kind of don't want the world to know that you visited use your iphone right and you know somebody said that to me and i'm like oh interesting things you don't want tracked use your iphone and you know because if you're searching and you don't want to be tracked use duckduckgo and you use and i'm like that makes a lot of sense because you know apple fights for your privacy more than any other browser and so it's not clear that uh so i think that the the future of a lot of what we do and how we do it um depends i think on how much we as consumers of information and entertainment um want our privacy protected and history has shown up until now is it's it's a kind of a mixed bag right i mean if you knew all the things where your privacy was being compromised you might be upset but you don't know that so you're not upset and you don't know enough to go figure that out and so is apple's slightly greater passion about privacy um going to win the day are more people going to use apple are more people going to use iphone than samsung i don't know um and so if i look if i look ahead um i think there's less and less battle about what the definition of a browser is but i do think that there is a battle based on how the browser functions with respect to things like privacy that was a really good point and also since you brought up the iphone uh obviously iphones come with safari personally i never downloaded google chrome or firefox on my um on my iphone and a lot of people that i know don't also do the same thing do you think that helps them you know having a phone that's very popular with a browser and obviously people continue to use that like you said if they don't want to google something on their on their laptop or just have it in their house you know most of the time people might just have a phone and not a computer do you think that also may help them stick around in the game yeah i think that a lot of people um who have apple phones don't go to the effort to download a different browser but of course they can they can download firefox they can download chrome and google would love it if you just use the chrome browser and they would tell you it's faster and it's funner and better for watching youtube or whatever it is whatever reason is but i think that um one of the things that having a more privacy centric browser on iphones by default means is that we all figure out and we might realize that private it's okay if we if we protect our privacy the world's not going to come to an end right so we all think oh nothing i won't be able to do anything fun if i protect my privacy because you know that it knows so much and tells me stuff and it just hands me stuff right and um and so i don't know if you played with your iphone um one thing i find frustrating with my iphone even if i'm using google search on safari in my iphone is i start typing something and on every other device i've got it's guessing what i'm typing and i don't spell very well and so i'm like oh thank you so much right you're you're saving my spelling well the reason apple doesn't do that is to check your spelling it has to send what you're typing up to a server somewhere and get back what you might be meaning to type and that is data that they retain and can data mine and so do you want every keystroke going up to a server while you're typing a google search or not and i will admit that when i'm sitting in my phone and i'm typing stuff and it doesn't know what i'm typing i'm a little miffed about that right i mean and apparently i care a lot about privacy myself but apparently i don't care that part about privacy as long as the data is being used to correct my bad spelling and you know know that i'm going to type you know air conditioner duct adapter or whatever it is that i'm going to type um and so i i think i'm happy because i'm very aware of all this i'm happy that i use an iphone i'm happy that the they have decided not to send every one of my keystrokes up to a server but it's an interesting experiment i'm curious do you have an iphone yep i do and so have you noticed i'm also a really bad speller so i totally know yeah so have you noticed this thing where the iphone doesn't seem to know what you mean in ways that everything else does definitely and does it frustrate you do you wish that okay so you're like me then yeah um and and uh but this is kind of an experiment that's a consequence of privacy right a consequence of increased privacy that apple has chosen they didn't ask you by the way they didn't ask you if you wanted type ahead whatever and there might even be a button somewhere in my phone and i can turn type ahead on i don't know i haven't found it it hasn't annoyed me enough and so i just think that apple is in a weird and unique place in the marketplace because they have an operating system they have hardware they have software they have phones and so they can experiment with privacy in ways that um uh an android phone can't because they're dependent on apps and so your phone's trying to be private but then your app kind of breaks the privacy and so and android's just just a little more of a wild west in terms of what apps they let come in and how they check those apps and the apple is a little more you know protective of you and we'll see we'll see that's a it's a weird way to segment the marketplace right and it's not how it's been um it's not the browser segmentation of the marketplace has been like features that only work on one browser and then they kind of trick us software developers into using those features but i don't see that in the future um i we all do i think at this point think of the browser as a natural side effect of computers in general meaning if it has a keyboard and a screen it ought to have a browser right i mean if it has a keyboard and a screen you should be able to type you know www.xyxyz.com or whatever it is and that

ought to work and um you know www.cbs.com or abc.com and those should work if it has a keyboard and a screen and we'll lose the fact that that's a browser we'll lose the fact that that's a piece of software that you install and i think that's kind of where microsoft is going as it goes from internet explorer to edge is that they just kind of feel like you know you hit the hit the start button and you type www.whatever and it goes oh i think what you are interested in is something on the internet i will start this piece of software called a browser you never installed it you don't even notice that it's software you just think it's part of what's on your screen and um and you know could you uninstall it would you uninstall it would you take the browser off of your computer i don't know i do think that we as humans are just expecting from this point forward that everything we buy we'll have a keyboard a network connection and be able to handle web addresses and show us those those things and the fact that it's a piece of software is almost going to just fade away right um speaking to that just looking back historically talk to me a little bit about the importance and impact that a browser does have and did have on our community um like you mentioned you know putting a paywall on the browser obviously isn't free access for all all over the country which is what we have now there are obviously talks still about you know speed of internet and how you know we try to block that off to have just kind of an equal playing field on uh web searching so just yeah so just touch a little bit on that just like that importance the history and the impact it makes not just on our society here but globally well the probably the single biggest impact that the browser has had in general in technology is the ability to create a rich interactive graphically engaging application and make it so that it can be delivered dynamically to every screen and keyboard and so you could think of a game right like pong for example so imagine in the 70s pong you had to buy a cabinet and they would bring it in a truck and you'd plug it in and that's how you have a pawn game and now you just go to something dot www.something.com and the next thing you're doing is you're playing a pawn game on the keyboard in the screen that you came with so think of that as like the ability for me to write a pawn game put it somewhere and and install it instantly on everyone's computer and the web is a way to distribute applications um you know that's what i do most every second of every day is build web applications like i work on learning management systems and we don't have to install the learning management system on a computer because our learning management system uses the web and everybody comes with a browser and so if i give you the url of this place to get your grades well then you just go and get your grades on that system and you don't have to install any software and so it and that's why in the early days in 1994 95 96 the the that the battle was so fierce over the browser and the future of the browser is because it meant that for all intents and purposes we had a way to develop software that had instant installation meaning you instead of installing it finding it installing it using it you just go to it and it works and so it it revolutionized how software is developed and how software is used and how software is deployed and and so that that's the thing that the browser really transformed is how we develop and distribute software and in general technology has advanced quickly in the past two decades the internet explorer isn't the only browser that's come and gone um the blackberry isn't the only phone that's come and gone so just talk to me about the evolution of technologies and these type of search engines or softwares and just how things do have ebbs and flows how things do come and go um why do you think that is and to that samick to that same point uh what that could mean for the future of apple or chromebooks or anything like that the iphone yeah absolutely that's i think that's a really great observation i would say another thing that came and went are flip phones right and flip phones were everywhere and you know you mentioned blackberry so if you think of any system of technology any kind of you know little thing that has chips in it and maybe a battery um whatever you buy uh from who is selling you this thing there is a need to expand it right so that so if you just just imagine that you buy a stove and you want a recipe application on your stove right and so if samsung tells me as a software developer that we've got a stove and you can write a special little widget that goes on stoves that is a recipe look up widget and i have to kind of they have to i have to program this in some weird programming language that samsung invented and i've gotta use some weird thing that samsung is using and but then when i've got it i got this little widget that shows up on a samsung called chuck's recipes right and it can show up on a refrigerator and it can show up on a thing and this extensibility and plug ability and the ability to add features to some kind of technology that has a screen keyboard and you know computer inside of it um history has shown that whenever you do that in a way that's unique to you [Music] that doesn't have a very long life and so you could build a recipe application on a flip phone you could build a recipe application on a blackberry and you would go to the flip phone company and you'd learn this thing called java me and you would realize that every flip phone every few months you had to change your software a little tiny bit because that flip phone had more memory or less memory you couldn't do this or you could do that or the way you access the internet in a flip phone is kind of weird and the same for a blackberry you had to like learn the ways of the blackberry and then the poor blackberry would change or a windows phone we had a windows phone for a while and so that it's this modular expandability that tends to take something like nokia phones which were ubiquitous universal and literally everywhere on the planet the old hershey stick phone that was the nokia was everywhere and if you ever had one you had like um what was it centipede on that thing and you could play centipede and clear a few things you or i could write an application on nokia but the way we write the application on the nokia is extremely limited in the nokia and learning how to write an application for nokia does not help you write the same application for a blackberry or flip phone it's completely different those things are all on the dust bin of history and there's a lot of to like about blackberry actually but it's all on the dust dust heap of history and that's because the world wide web as a way to build deploy widgets that extend some kind of chunk of technology that's got a keyboard and a screen if you can do it as a web application using html and css and javascript and server-side callbacks then you can extend uh an android phone you can extend an iphone you can you can talk to people on windows computers you can talk to people on ubuntu computers you can talk to people who are just using televisions right and so the key thing is is every technological ecosystem needs uh expansion point for some extension that you would just add and the web itself and browsers itself have created a definition of an expansion point that if your television supports html css http and a couple other protocols then by golly i can write a recipe for your television i can i can give you a way to view recipes on your television and of course my example of samsung stoves they don't have a web browser in them yet which means i'm not about to write recipe location for a samsung stove but the day they have a browser in your stove well maybe i will have a recipe application it won't be all that hard for me to write a recipe application so it has to do with modular expansion of techno ecosystems that's a really good point and like how uh for blackberry like bbm was only on the blackberry aim which was only on the sidekick so i can see how that you if you get an iphone well i don't have bbm where can i you know so that's that's a very valid point thank you for sharing yeah and then the trio if you're if you're going all back to those times there's the trio i mean one of my favorite handheld devices is still the trio the hand spring trio and you know i apple has declared that you can't have a keyboard on your phone you're not allowed you know so there you go um and so maybe i would like a keyboard on my phone but it but apple they don't have them and and blackberry had keyboards but now we're not allowed to have keyboards because apple declared um and then last point i'm not sure if you can touch on this specific you might be able to but um i had a conversation with someone one of my professors once just about um so i have a macbook and i've been using mac since i was probably in like middle school and one of the impacts of me still using a mac now is the fact that i used it when i was in school and i know google chrome has a lot of partnerships with schools offering them very low deals on chromebooks and things like that um kind of in a way to get those younger kids used to using chromebooks and potentially have them use that same device all the way to adulthood talk to me a little bit about that what impact do you think that has on consumers and if you think that will maybe make the chromebook the new mac for us or would or what you just kind of just that young kid technology what you're used to impact on the longevity of your product and you know use in the future so i i i don't that the k-12 market right is a place where everybody wants to expose their product to the child and hopefully that means that when people become adults they are predisposed to the same product as adults and so so for me the hardware has been a constant battle like the old apple twos with the green monitors and oregon trail you know that was used to be that the only thing that happened in k12 was apples right then they uh then they kind of went to pcs and then like for a while i tried to win the battle with ipads and uh and then you know google is trying to do chromebooks um and you know the the hardware that tends to win in k12 is the hardware that doesn't break because the younger a person is the more likely it is they're going to drop it or type something or you know turn it off and on and a hard drive is going to go bad or something they just get a lot of abuse they get used by many people and so i think chromebook is going to tend to win in that it's very ruggedized um just and but but then the the question that you're asking about what what let's just assume chromebook is going to win or something like the chromebook which is a very lockdown system which really for all intents and purposes is a keyboard a screen a network connection and a browser because in a chromebook you're using a browser and you're using google docs right and if microsoft wants to play in this game they got to create a web-based word because then if they got a web-based word which i think they have um then they can be on the chromebooks right and so the you know it's not like hopefully chrome won't make it so that word works really badly on chromebooks but you know it's all in the cloud it's not on the chromebook and what's cool about that is that as long as your browser works then your data is in the cloud and you you can't if you uh you know drive your car over your chromebook you didn't delete all of your files right um and so i think that when it's all said and done the question is more about what software you're going to choose to to like and use as an adult so i see college students who are you know coming of age right now and i don't think it mattered what hardware they used when they were in k12 but they all use google docs and google slides and and those kinds of technologies to do their word processing so the notion that you could even have a usb stick that has all your all your writings on it that is a notion that's completely foreign to young people the past 15 years because no matter what their school had as hardware they all used google docs right and google email and google sheets and google drive and the teachers use google drive and they use google sheets and they use this and they use that and so google is using chrome which is a brilliant brilliant piece of hardware in that it doesn't break right it's simple doesn't take a lot of power all the work is done in the cloud on the server but it does mean that it is almost a foreign notion for young people by the time they're in like seventh grade to imagine that their writings belong to them that their writings are you you knew in that macbook where your homework was you could take it with you and if you didn't want to someone looking at your homework and scanning it to see what to sell you it was in your computer but if you're using google docs you know google tells you they're not going to look at that stuff right and you know i'm probably they're not but it's just not in your possession so what what are you going to do and um and so you know i think what what we're learning from the the continuous move toward simpler and simpler physical devices that have no brains whatsoever and no data whatsoever in k-12 is that we are basically training young people that don't be concerned about privacy that you you don't need to protect your data from google google is the overlord google google is safety if you take it out of google it's less safe but in google it is safe and so you know do you want it on your laptop like i'm old enough to know that i know what's on this laptop i'm sitting in and i know what where my backups are and it's not sitting in the google right now i don't when i put stuff in google i know i've done it i'm like okay this thing i will put in google because i want to share it with a bunch of people blah blah blah blah but then i'm going to make a copy of it on my laptop you know and and so i think that the k-12 thing is teaching people to not care about privacy or to believe that that you the zone of control is not just your laptop but it's your laptop plus google and anything inside of google that's that's as safe as you can be you know keep it in google that's the safe place and it's it's not the worst thing in the world for people to believe that um there are other places that i think your data is at much greater risk than google and and and the reason for that is um that if if word got out that google was leaking your data right you write your paper in seventh grade about patriotism and you know you're exploring things in seventh grade you say something weird in seventh grade about patriotism and you think well that paper's not going to go away and then you're 25 years old and you're running for congress and all of a sudden your seventh grade paper shows up and the only place you ever put that paper in is google right and you didn't share it with anybody you just typed it in and gave it to your teacher but somehow the national media has your seventh grade paper that's that you put into google at that point google's world comes crashing down right i mean if all of a sudden people lose faith and it doesn't take much to lose faith right it does not take much to lose faith and i know people that work for google and i know how careful google is to not make mistakes that might lead to us losing faith that storing data in google is as safe as storing data on your laptop right and i'm not convinced that's true but so far google has been able to keep up that appearance that that your data is locked tightly and the only ones looking at it are google and google has moved away from at least you know to the extent they talk about it publicly they seem to be peaking at your data less and less i mean meaning that that and i think that the reason for that is that they know enough about you from your searches and everything else you do they don't need to look at your seventh grade papers to figure out what to sell that you wanna canoe tomorrow and we're gonna start sending you ads for canoes um you know that so your seventh grade paper just isn't valuable to them not that they couldn't do it but they just have done it and they're like man that's so great why bother why even look at seventh grade papers and then just you know make a commitment to privacy and this goes back to where i think that apple as a company has a more core value of privacy than google does but for google it's survival right and it is life or death for google to protect the data that we entrust with it i'm not sure where that's where that you wanted that question no that was great that was a lot i've been learning so much i'm i feel like i'm in lecture but i'm enjoying this um is there anything else you would like to uh no highlight mention that i didn't bring up that you think is important for people to know about browser the history of browser the depth of internet explorer just anything i didn't mention not really i mean you know ultimately in all of these things they all kind of have an arc right the internet explorer had an arc and like their their benefit their lack of benefit though they were they were they were good guys they were bad guys they were they added positive and negative at the same time just because they were an active part of the market and you know on the whole i think that the market really has benefited greatly from having internet explorer be part of it right and so uh well while many will uh dance a jig because you know internet explorer 11 is gone um well i just had a light go out um because internet explorer is gone i i i you know i see the good and i see the bad that they did and i'm happy with all of it and it's it is time to move on okay my supervisor calls internet explorer internet exploder yeah well that's because that's because um there was a time that for those of us developing web applications the internet explorer was kind of like the anchor that slowed us down maintaining compatibility and that's why a lot of people are like yay it's gone um i don't think it was quite as bad as some of the earlier versions of internet explorer that were very different and very far-reaching because one of the things that you know we in the united states don't realize is that there's places around the world that are using windows xp still yeah and they're still using like old really old versions of internet explorer and you know you go to india and you will not see a windows 10 laptop anywhere you know except in you know companies and businesses but like in homes you'll just see some old hardware old software and so it's difficult for those of us who write software to decide when to give up because you do cut out a whole bunch of people and just because support ends today for a particular version of internet explorer the one that shipped with windows vista is still out there and and while it's a tiny fraction of the market globally especially if we think about it from the west perspective um in a bunch of places it's the only browser and you know you go to you go to india or sub-saharan africa and you find that uh that these not even the latest explorer but you know explorer nine or eight uh are still prevalent and we you know and so if you build software and you wanna help those people or teach those people you gotta still you can't ignore these older browsers right that's a good point so just to make sure i understood what i digested today seven key takeaways i see is people love free the browser should be free people aren't going to start paying for browser anytime the idea of a browser is like you said kind of innate at this point you have a computer you expect to be able to search up whatever you want to search but then also to be successful as a browser or a developer what you create has to work everywhere it has to work on my mac has to work on my pc has to work on my chromebook otherwise your longevity there won't really necessarily be any and then i like your kind of takes about privacy too because i do think obviously that's more and more in the conversation but to your point if i'm a kid and i'm using google chrome i think google's safe you know and like you said for the most part it is but that my first thought is oh i can put everything on google i can use google docs that's free and i have that and it has my stuff and it's safe no one's going to harm me but once they violate that then who knows what could happen to google so i thought that was a very interesting it's a yeah that was your entire business model depends on protecting your privacy for now even though i don't believe they're i don't believe that they're kind of philosophically committed to protecting your privacy they're financially committed to protecting your copy yes yeah right i think i think apple is more philosophically committed to protecting your privacy um and google it's in their financial best interest to do so so which of those things is the better thing because core values can change too we've seen that right or values you get new management or or the revenue starts falling and all of a sudden core values just go out the window yeah

2022-06-22 17:48

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