Microsoft's Chrome
For a company that discovered the Internet so late, Microsoft has caught up quickly. Indeed, in some areas they are now so far ahead of the rest of the pack that it's almost breathtaking to watch. Chrome is one of these areas. Unfortunately, Chrome is not for the less dedicated-it requires a 350 MHz Pentium computer with at least 64 MB of RAM, a minimum of a 100 MHz bus speed, an AGP graphics card, and Windows 98.
Chrome is an XML application that allows you to make 2D and 3D interactive animations. Yes, I know VRML can do this already, and I already mentioned another attempt to achieve something similar earlier in this chapter (VXML). Picture a three-dimensional cube floating in the center of your Web browser's window. You can rotate the cube as you want by moving your mouse to the left and right, or up and down. You can zoom in on one of the faces by using the scroll dial on the mouse. Each of the faces of the cube has a Web page on it, in perfect miniature: text, graphics, the works. (Chrome allows you to add any texture to any surface and that texture can also be an HTML Web page.) Rotate an interesting face to the front and click on it; the cube explodes outward to show six more pages textured onto the inside surfaces.
There are two major challenges to face in Chrome; the technical one (getting it to work), and the practical one of how on earth do we use this-how are we going to create applications that use it? There are a million questions to ask and it's going to be some time before we learn to master this new kind of user interaction.