FOR GOOGLE, BROWSER IS EVERYTHING

With 1,500 employees, Google India is the largest development centre for the Internet giant outside its home country, the United States. The unit, which contributes heavily towards product research and design, has also spearheaded the development of products such as mapmaker, phone-search etc. DNA caught up with Prasad Ram, head of research and development for Google India, to discuss the future of the internet as Google sees it.

With companies such as yours pursuing more and more applications to the browser-Internet, will the operating system become irrelevant?

We are betting big on cloud computing. A lot of the services that you use, whether it is Gmail or Youtube, are cloud services. There is a level of user experience that we are able to deliver that meets the users' expectations. The main difference between a thick client (traditional applications such as word-processors and image-viewers) and a thin client like the browser is that the thick client has access to a lot of system resources. It is therefore, able to deliver a certain level of functionality. But since then, significant advances have happened in browser technology, with the use of Ajax, javascript etc, that are able to generate a comparable level of experience for the user within the browser.

Now, on top of this, the benefits of cloud computing (distributed, internet-based computing) accrue. So, the browser has become a ubiquitous client and the applications are being run out of the cloud, rather than using the system resources. This is a big shift that is happening.

So, on the question of whether the operating system becomes irrelevant -- from the users' perspective, they care about the experience. They care about whether my contacts get backed up or not, can sync my calendar with that of my phone...?

Do you see it reach a point where the only application that a computer needs is a browser and everything else runs inside the browser?

If you are a user who just checks mail, reads news and watches videos, you are already there. But if you want to use a high-power application that needs a lot of system resources, you have to build a custom application (outside of the browser). High-power tools like enterprise applications, design software etc will need to exploit much more of the power of the device.

Another area is where you need a huge level of interactivity, because a custom client can provide very fast interactivity whereas a browser would need to interact with the server to interact. An example is gaming.

What is the next challenge in this direction of bringing everything within the browser?

There is an opportunity to improve the interactivity by allowing the browser to store the information locally and retrieve it when required, such as in maps. You can give the user a better experience by using something like the gears (Google Gears -- an experimental feature to store information locally in the absence of internet connectivity).

However, it works mainly with static data, or data that doesn't change too often. It won't work for wiki-based models under which a large number of people are simultaneously working on it. Gears also addresses the issue of connectivity. For example, if you are working on a document and there is intermittent connectivity, it will sync back with the server when the connectivity is re-established.

 

Source: DNA