David M Smith

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David Mitchell Smith
VP & Gartner Fellow
16 years at Gartner
30 years IT industry

David Mitchell Smith is a vice president and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research, where he specializes in the impact of catalytic technologies such as the Internet, Web 2.0, cloud computing and consumer technologies. Read Full Bio

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Obscure acquisition highlights HTML5, Webkit and who’s the only one left out…

by David M. Smith  |  August 27, 2009  |  3 Comments

A relatively obscure acquisition (Torch Mobile, a Toronto browser specialist, by RIM, makers of BlackBerry) highlighted and reinforced something I’d been thinking about for a while: that virtually all major companies have now or are moving towards webkit and HTML5.  RIM has made a lot of progress with its own browser in recent years, but has apparently decided to go this way.  It basically leave Microsoft the lone holdout.  With its mobile strategy in flux, with Windows Mobile 7 promising a better browsing experience and with IE (in Windows) needing to move beyond its Trident base, now would be the time to do it.  The company has started paying some attention to HTML5 (not just completely pooh pooh-ing it), but indications are that it is not adopting a strategy centered around it. We’ll see how long it will hold out…

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3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Kyle Johnson   August 27, 2009 at 1:06 pm

    I’m not sure how you are defining “major companies” or the specific market, but mobile Firefox does not, to my knowledge, use webkit, nor does mobile Opera.

  • 2 David M. Smith   August 27, 2009 at 1:16 pm

    thanks for the comment. was meaning the major companies in the web, whether mobile or not. so Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, etc. were the major ones i was referring to. Also it’s more the HTML5 part that is of importance. Webkit is a quick way to get there but not the only way.

    Davide

  • 3 Chris Parnell   August 27, 2009 at 9:45 pm

    An astute observation, given the state of the play at this point in time. Mobile web and mobile app developers are at the fore-front of exploring ways to both adopt and emulate HTML 5, and provide test cases. So HTML 5 is moving to centre stage as slowly as it moves toward Last Call. Over on tuxwire, an observation was made about the WHATWG blog kickstarting itself again, along with observations of a Microsoft executive sharing the co-chair task with Maicej of Apple. So lets hope that Microsoft do take up HTML5 proactively, as I, for one, am sick of having to sniff and code for varia versions of MSIE, when the rest of the world gets along just fine, even with HTML 5…