My last session of the day before the big Keynote was on the state of the union of web browser technology. The folks from Opera, Mozilla, and Google certainly were certainly bullish on the near term outlook of web browser technology, Javascript, web applications, and the emerging mobile and non-traditional browser technology.

According to the panel…

The web browser is becoming the new platform – or more so has become mature.

The browser is still missing a handful of rich client side functionality.

The browser is now a reliable platform that is pretty consistent as long as a developer writes good code. The browser is stable and now works as expected.

There are virtually no computers without a browser installed.

Mobile and other alternative browsers are hot on the heels of web browsers.

Javascript as a development platform has come into its own due to the fact that hardware and processors have become powerful enough to speed up performance.

The browser is the ultimate in cross platform development without the need to worry about installers or unique platform specific development.

The future focus on Javascript is on being more efficient and controlling data and code integrity.

2004 was the turning point in Browser history:

• Desktop apps were stagnating and took forever to iterate with new versions
• AJAX got a name and people took notice
• A lot of people jumped on the fad and were pushed to try new things
• There were a lot of little communities working on cool stuff and around this time they started to step over each other
• People had alot of time to tinker at home post bubble
• There was a move to the data web with API’s, services, etc. Browser became the platform for Mashups since it was simple and widely available
• Highspeed broadband penetration finally came to the average user
• Emergence of RSS and other simple XML usages that SOAP was too heavy for
• True web developers emerged as the old school app developers evolved into something new
• You no longer need to write huge amounts of code to support a ton of unique browser technologies. It really became a much more singular platform. Things slowed down and came into sync

Rich web apps are still a challenge for non-traditional browsers. It will still take some time to really perfect the build once and run on all platforms. As video game consoles adopt web browsers we are seeing a big focus on web apps for non traditional browsers.

Desktop web browsers are nice but the non-traditional browser is set for an explosion in the near term.