It’s not a matter of bandwidth, or cost, or reliability, or security. Yet. We’ll get to those problems eventually. But first there’s still a usability problem to solve. Life in the browser has come a long way in a short time, but it still has a long way to go. More and more complicated tasks are moving out of the independent desktop application and becoming tabs in a browser.  Office apps, image and music editing, and even video editing are web apps now. When you use these web apps you have to convince yourself that even though the user experience is much worse, somehow this is better. In exchange for access from anywhere (previously attainable with portable media) we trade consistent desktop integration, such as reliable cutting and pasting (something Microsoft still struggles with on the desktop).

I’ve been using Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) to sync bookmarks and passwords across the various browsers and computers I use for about a year. During that year the product only got better, and I really had no complaints.

I could have just said it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it. But two things happened - I got a Nexus One, and I saw people raving about LastPass. LastPass doesn’t do the bookmark syncing, but it does offer an Android app with the paid version. And bookmarks are so 90s. They’re rarely useful. And besides, Chrome, my current browser of choice, automatically syncs my bookmarks to my Google Docs account. I was really using Xmarks for the password syncing.

Now I’m not going to do the feature vs feature breakdown with charts and graphs that the title may have implied. I’m just going to describe the two experiences:

Xmarks - Create your account, install the software, surf the web. It imports the saved passwords in your browser and remembers new ones you use. It syncs automatically with their server. Browsers on other computers you use (or other browsers on the same machine) automatically stay in sync. After a couple of weeks of using Xmarks you forget about it, and it just becomes part of how surfing the web works. You can view your bookmarks by signing in to their website from any browser.

LastPass - Create your account, install the software, try to surf the web. It imports (and wipes out) the passwords in your browser. When you go to a site that requires a log in you get two weird options – AutoFill and AutoLogin. Try all the options listed under each and eventually sometimes one of them turns out the be your credentials for that site. You’re in! Unless of course none of those worked. In that case you get temporarily redirected to a form on a separate page that asks about dozen questions about that particular site / login. Most are optional. Instead of staying out of your way and working behind the scenes, LastPass is constantly in your face. About 25% of the time I end up having to log in without it. And lastly, if you lose your LastPass password you are SCREWED. There’s no recovery.

End result – LastPass uninstalled. I’m back to Xmarks. All is good with the world again.

The Science is in!  The debate over global warming is over. The hockey stick chart proves it.

I realize most of you believe that, and probably aren’t even picking up on my sarcasm. That’s fine. If you believe that  it’s settled –  global warming is real and man made, and we must do something to stop it – I can’t do anything to change your mind. You can’t reason someone out of a position that reason didn’t get them in to. Global Warming is your religion, Al Gore is your Savior.

All I ask is that you take 15 minute to read a speech Michael Crichton gave to the National Press Club on January 25, 2005.

Michael’s detailed explanation of why he criticizes global warming scenarios. Using published UN data, he reviews why claims for catastrophic warming arouse doubt; why reducing CO2 is vastly more difficult than we are being told; and why we are morally unjustified to spend vast sums on this speculative issue when around the world people are dying of starvation and disease.

There are scientists who believe in Global Warming – even ones who were alive during the 1970′s Global Cooling crisis-that-never-was. They are the ones the media gives the mic to. And despite what we are told every day, there are also scientists who do not. 31,486 American scientists, including 9,029 with PhDs signed a petition stating that there is no convincing scientific evidence of man-made global climate change. BUT NONE OF THAT MATTERS!

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.  Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.  In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. -Michael Crichton

Now go read the whole speech, and let us never speak of this again.

Steve Jobs finally decided to explain why you don’t want Flash on your iPhone. Interesting timing, just after Andy Rubin (co-founder and former CEO of Danger, Inc. and Android, currently VP of Engineering at Google overseeing development of Android) sat down with the New York Times and said Flash is coming to Android in 2.2 (Froyo). Jobs’ six reasons made me wish George Carlin was still around to give this list the Ten Commandments treatment.

There aren’t six reasons on that list, there’s one: Steve doesn’t want people using their proprietary solution, he wants them to use his proprietary solution. This is a pissing contest, and iPhone users are getting pissed on.

Jobs says Adobe Flash is proprietary and Apple is “open” because they’re using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. This is funny coming from one of the reigning kings of both closed source hardware and software. Somehow, faced with the exact same problem Google has worked out a solution. It turns out supporting HTML5 AND Flash are not mutually exclusive! Google loves “open,” but something had to give for the sake of user experience.

This is a power-play for the Apps market. Unbridled Flash support threatens to redirect money from Steve’s pocket. I don’t necessarily agree with Andy Rubin’s idea that people care about this whole “open” thing. I think it’s just the geek-set that cares, and in fact even just a subset of the geek-set. I tend to count myself among that group – until I really need to get something done with the tools I have right now. That’s why my Ubuntu laptop dual boots Windows XP, and why I keep a copy of Office 2003 installed, even though I mostly work in Open Office.

If the reliability, security, performance, and battery life problems Jobs points out are true, Flash is garbage. And I think they are true, and Flash is garbage. Either Adobe will fix them (they won’t) or Flash will die a natural death. But as he popints out, “75% of video on the web is in Flash.” What good is the 1 GHz Snapdragon in my Nexus One if I can’t use it to surf the web as it exists today? Are people buying iPhones to use them today, or to surf the web in some mystical, open web of the future?