Chrome Dev Summit finds web apps still struggling next to shiny native counterparts
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, Google’s Chrome team might be a candidate for involuntary commitment.
The ad biz’s browser boffins are presiding over yet another Chrome Dev Summit in the hope of putting web applications on equal footing with native applications.
“We want to close the capability gap between the web and native and make it easy for developers to build great experiences on the open web,” explained Pete LePage, a developer advocate on Google’s web team, in a blog post on Monday.
As if to underscore the quixotic nature of this quest, LePage gives himself a self-designated job title in his post: dreamer.
Establishing platform parity between the web and native code has been Google’s fever dream for about a decade. That’s when Google execs first claimed the web had won. That was in the midst of the mobile app gold rush and it quickly became apparent that web-based development couldn’t compete against native platform code, at least on mobile devices.
