Developers have tried to overcome such barriers in the past with client-side enhancements like ActiveX, Netscape Plugins, Java Applets, but each in its own way was flawed and failed to gain mass adoption. It is possible that the Native Client project will change all this, but standardization of such initiatives across the browser landscape is a lengthy endeavor. For the near future the tools that the developer uses to provide a rich user experience remain JavaScript and ActionScript, plug-ins, such as the ones previously mentioned, are significantly limited by the architectural mismatch of performance requirements they place on the CPU.

It would be incredible, truly incredible, if hardware was designed specifically for web browsing. Can you imagine a chip designed specifically for rendering plugins? Imagine if JavaScript, Flash, and Silverlight all ran with hardware acceleration. Everything on the web would be faster, and CPU usage wouldn't be pegged at 100% when you try to watch an HD video in Flash. While I think it's cool that Mozilla is willing to entertain the idea of hardware accelerated JavaScript, I don't really see that happening. JavaScript engines are pretty fast these days. What we could really use is hardware acceleration for Flash and Silverlight (or at least a series of optimized instruction sets), and I don't really see that happening unless the runtimes are made open source.

Even if we get code running natively in the browser through the Native Client project, and HTML5 makes Flash video obsolete, I have a feeling plugins will return. It may well make sense to start engineering them with hardware acceleration in mind.

This was quite a surprise! Tobias Schneider has built a Flash runtime that works right in the browser. It's implemented in pure Javascript and HTML5, and the whole thing is open source, MIT-licensed, and hosted on GitHub.

Flash on the iPhone? Impossible? Not quite.

I'm not sure that Tobias understands the consequences of his actions. Flash is now enabled on the iPhone and any other phone that can render both JavaScript and HTML5. While the ability to render Flash is limited to simple animation and interactivity, it's enough. I'm not sure what the k-size is for the entire package, but it's safe to say that we'll start seeing sites that use this almost immediately, and possibly even rich media ads.

The coolest thing thing about is that it actually solves one of the fundamental problems of bringing Flash to the iPhone – battery life. The Flash runtime is extremely poorly optimized. On Mac OS X it consumes a tremendous amount of CPU resources. By rendering SWFs without Flash installed developers can bring animation to the mobile web without killing the already inadequate batteries of today's smart-phones.

He's calling the project "Gordon". Ah-ah! Saviour of the universe!

Interesting: When you copy text from a New Yorker article and paste it somewhere else, it automatically includes a “Read more: URL” at end of paste.

Matt Linderman, of 37signals, points out an interesting feature on the New Yorker website. Apparently The New Yorker uses a service called Tynt to track readers who copy and paste text from their articles. Tynt is piece of JavaScript that you can embed on a site which tracks every time a user copies text, and can even append that snippet with a "Read more" link if you desire.

A rather brilliant way to measure engagement for a blog. The insights from the data that a service like this would return could be used to better optimize individual blogs posts in terms of word count, sentence structure, and sentence length. I tend to believe that this is just one of those incredibly simple things that no one ever thought of before, but will end up being a standard feature in analytics software going forward.