Today was an interesting day of at Web 2.0 Expo. There were 2 sessions in particular that caught my attention because they clearly mark the next step in the transition from the desktop to the “cloud.” One of these sessions was the Chrome Developer Session by Ojan Vanfai, one of the project engineers from Google. Given the affirmation that ”Google’s main hope (being) to see web applications succeed,” they have built a new javascript engine for the browser called V8. The engine is open source, as is a version of the product called Chromium; I think this will go a long way to addressing privacy concerns by providing transparency to the product. Chrome uses the web-kit rendering engine also used by Safari. The product also comes with WebKit Developer Tools, think Firebug. Both Mac and Linux versions of the product were in development.

The other really interesting session was that by Pete LePage from Microsoft’s IE8 team; there’s a pdf copy of the presentation slides available. Like Chrome, IE8 seems also poised to provide a platform for web based applications. While this was not explicitly stated, it was clearly evident from the presentation. IE8 includes native support for JSON. They too have also built a Web Developer tool very reminiscent to Firebug. IE8 has a new rendering engine which is much more standards compliant …. yeeeeaaaay! It has a button that allows users to switch between the IE7 and IE8 rendering engines. Pete mentioned this was meant to be easy so that “your mom” could do it. Personally, I think this is a stretch. He implored designers and developers to test their websites as there are Pete did a great job of sidestepping the all too common complaints regarding rendering engine issues pertaining to standards.