Like most heavy technology users I’ve been moving heavily toward hosted web applications over the past few years. I don’t use Evolution or mutt anymore, I use GMail. I don’t organize my photos on my laptop and use my own hosted Gallery, I use Flickr. I’ve never been a big office application user, but when I’m forced to open a Powerpoint deck, edit an Excel file or print out a Word document, I do it using Google docs.

I’ve also spent the past four or five or so years working on blurring the line between what’s on your desktop and what’s online. At Flock I worked to synchronize your bookmarks to online services and between machines, to integrate personalized web search into your desktop workflow and to make publishing media from your devices as easy as publishing text from your keyboard. At Songbird we developed APIs to allow web apps to interact with your desktop media player and APIs to let your desktop media player access content from the web. At Rdio I worked on similar things, from a slightly different approach, I don’t think I can talk about them yet.

I’m really excited that Google has the balls (and the skills) to go all out. To commit to offering enough APIs to web applications to allow them to provide the same functionality and user experience as desktop applications would. This isn’t the first time that this has been attempted, but I think this time it just might work. Just a couple of years ago when the iPhone launched and Apple announced that the only way to write applications was to write web applications users and developers rebelled. The iPhone browser wasn’t capable enough. Google have taken the right approach by committing to improving the web platform to support whatever APIs are needed before shipping the product.

I’ll never be running Chrome OS. I rely on too many specialized applications, but I am looking forward to when Flickr can pull photos right off my camera and GMail’s offline features are widely tested enough to actually work right. Much of the innovation in Chrome OS will benefit us all.

Somehow I’ve spent most of the past seven years working with the platform. I touched on it at Eazel where we used Gecko to display HTML, but mostly left the hard work of integrating a barely-ready gtkmozembed to Mike and Ramiro

Then at Danger I ended up as the main engineer working on our licensed fork of the ProxiWeb web proxy (love those innovative names) which used Mozilla (circa M6 or M8 I think) on Solaris x86 to format web pages for display on hiptops and Sidekicks. Later we built our own web proxy based on Mozilla 1.3, following a similar model but with all the lessons we learned maintaining the old code for years.

Eventually I ran away with the circus as one of the first employees at Flock where we were trying to re-imagine the desktop browser experience, based on Firefox. After a couple of years struggling with vision and execution they worked it out – soon after I left. Now it’s showing the potential of moving beyond the dominant Mosaic-with-tabs user experience that the main players are following.

Now I’m at Songbird, building another kind of browser – one whose focus is integrating media consumption and management. We’re building on XULRunner, the application platform that has been spun out from the Mozilla applications. It’s not my favorite platform for building applications, but how else are you going to build a cross-platform web browser.

Somehow this passing interest I had ten years ago has turned into a career.

This kind of bundling is often done by the bad guys. If you install Apple’s Quicktime codecs on Windows every update will trigger an iTunes install, even if you haven’t installed iTunes. I’m sure they’ll do the same thing for Safari on Windows. I’m not sure what iTunes’ market share on Windows is but it seems to be significant. If all those users suddenly have Safari installed that could potentially cause a big shake-up in browser market share.

On Friday there was a minor shitstorm on planet.mozilla.org about Apple pushing down Safari to all Windows iTunes and Quicktime users.

If only we had a reusable system-wide XULRunner it would be really easy to do similar but less evil promotion of our growing XUL-based free software suite. Songbird could suggest to users that they might like Firefox – and it would take just a single click and a tiny XPI download to have users running Firefox. We could even get intelligent and suggest Thunderbird to heavy email users or Flock to heavy social networking users.

iTunes’ US market share is around 27% (according to the best numbers I can find). If Apple flips the switch and makes Safari the default browser for all those users Firefox will start looking irrelevant fast.

Almost two and a half years ago I met up with Bart Decrem for coffee in Palo Alto. He was working with Geoffrey Arone to build a company to write a new browser. Bart wasn’t fully clear on exactly what it would look like or exactly what it would do but he believed that it was important to build a web browser that would break new ground in functionality and experience. He showed me a prototype that showed off two pretty amazing features: really simple bookmarking shared bookmarking and the ability to take pieces of web pages and store them for later reuse. I was excited so I quit my job and joined up.

The first day we were working out of the Bessemer offices in Menlo Park. Beyond Bart, Geoffrey and myself the team included Daryl Houston, Chris Messina, Andy Smith and Anthony Young. Pretty quickly the vision came together. Even though Daryl is the only one of us left at the company the 1.0 product that was just released this week is pretty much what we wanted to build.

In the past couple of years the company has had its ups and downs. There were personality conflicts that were handled pretty poorly (especially by me). There were times of hyper-productivity (I hacked for basically 24 hours straight in a hotel room in Portland to get a feature ready for 0.1) and unproductivity (what did I actually do in the last half of 2006?). But the high-level vision remained clear and nobody working on the product ever doubted that what we were doing was important.