Back in the Stone Age of the Internet—the mid/late 1990′s—a company called Netscape announced their intention to render the operating system (OS) obsolete. The OS was an architectural relic, Netscape argued, from a time before the Web gave us a platform that was independent of its underlying hardware.

As it turned out, Netscape’s promises turned out to be grander than their ability to deliver the technology. Meanwhile, their announcement had the effect of tapping the tiger on the nose; Microsoft mobilized, and a titanic battle ensued that came to be known as the browser wars. It ended when the Department of Justice intervened on a previously unseen scale, but not before Netscape was essentially reduced to a smoldering hole in the ground.

Now Google has announced that their open source Web browser, Chrome, will form the basis of a new web-based OS to be released in the second half of 2010. TechCrunch, never known to shy away from hyperbole, says that Google has dropped a nuclear bomb on Microsoft:

But let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, “However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Yeah, who do you think they mean by that? [...]

Google notes that any app developed for Google Chrome OS will work in any standards-compliant browser on any OS.

What Google is doing is not recreating a new kind of OS, they’re creating the best way to not need one at all. [...]

A lot of people are still wary about running web apps for when their computer isn’t connected to the web. But HTML 5 has the potential to change that, as you’ll be able to work in the browser even when not connected, and upload when you are again.

As that last paragraph implies, the main difference between Google’s effort, and Netscape’s a decade ago, is that the state of the art is now significantly more advanced. The technology of the web-based thin client has finally caught up to its promises. And Google, as a company, is both significantly more mature and well-financed than was Netscape.

This latest iteration of the browser wars should be interesting…

Sys-admins throughout Puget Sound had their long weekend disrupted on Friday when a fire at Fisher Plaza shut down power to their mission-critical data center. Thousands of websites were knocked offline, including the transaction processor Authorize.Net, the heavily-visited Microsoft Bing Travel, and AdHost, themselves a shared hosting provider for thousands more business and personal websites (here’s a partial list of affected websites).

As it happens, this wasn’t the first such outage at Fisher Plaza, where data service was also interrupted last year due to a similar electrical fire. Michael Young, CTO of real estate listings site Redfin, deserves kudos for recognizing the point of failure and instituting a disaster recovery plan. As he explained to TechFlash:

We were pretty embarrassed last June when Adhost had a similar electrical fire and took our site down for 8 hours (well into our core business hours) with brown-outs a day or two after that had us scrambling. ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’ resonated in our brains.

So by October 2008, we basically instituted a disaster avoidance plan where we had redundant-everything for our mission-critical databases, servers and networks in separate buildings.

When the problem happened last night, our beepers went off, we saw what looked like a major outage in one building, and were able to switch to the redundant systems.

Well done, Redfin!

This also seems like a good opportunity to put in a plug for Dreamhost, my own current hosting provider, with whom I’ve never had any day-long (or even half-day-long) outages, fire-related or otherwise. And remember: wherever you do your web hosting, a disaster recovery plan is a necessity, not a luxury.

The new Wordnik website is wonderful—about ten trillion times more useful than any of the other online dictionaries, none of which I will ever be using again.

If you haven’t looked up a word with Wordnik yet, its clean, slick design offers a given word’s:

• Dictionary definitions, from several sources
• Multiple real-world examples from historical texts
• Related words (thesaurus)
• Etymologies, also from several sources
• Audio pronunciation

Pretty useful so far, but those are also fairly standard dictionary features. Then Wordnik gets awesome:

• Real-time word use from Twitter
• Very cool bubble-graph of the word’s usage over time (going back to 1800!)
• Images from Flickr tagged with the word
• Anagrams
• Scrabble point score
• Community-uploaded word pronunciations

I’m also a big fan of their human-readable URLs. Here’s an example, from one of my favorite words:

http://www.wordnik.com/words/cacophony

The only downside is that if the word is somewhat rare—like abiogenesis, which I had to look up recently—then many of the features are truncated or gone. Another missing feature is a spelling suggestion tool; if you misspell a word, it doesn’t correct you or even give you an error message. In fairness to both criticisms, the project is clearly labeled as a beta.

Finally… yes, Wordnik contains dirty words, and yes, looking them up is every bit as juvenile and fun as it’s been since fifth grade.