War of the Web | Google Microsoft Adobe Mozilla

There is always a constant fight between the technologies to conquer the web. Sometime back it was Google with the use of AJAX revolutionized the user experience in the web. The user experience and navigations are made very simple using javascript and XML in its products like Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Picassa, etc. Now All the office applications are available on the web which makes it easy to access your data from anywhere in the world.



Later Microsoft also jumped into this with its own Microsoft Office Live Workspace which also offers the same kind of office functionalities on the net as against Google offered earlier. Microsoft Office Live is still in its beta and the access to it is restricted to very limited users. Read the review here .
Microsoft has also come out with its latest Silverlight which is a cross-browser, cross-platform plugin which is based on .Net and promises to give you rich media experience over the internet. Click here to see a small mashup application using Google maps and Silverlight.

Recently Adobe has introduced Adobe AIR( Adobe Integrated Runtime) which lets developers to create rich internet applications and lets you run it as a desktop application on various operating systems. It lets developers to develop application using AJAX, Flash and Flex.
With all these developments Adobe has acquired a startup company called Virtual Ubiquity , which has a product called Buzzword. Buzzword is an office application which is totally developed using Flash and Flex offers awesome user experience. The navigations are very smooth appearance looks very cool. Buzzword is in its beta and we can expect a lot of features to be added soon. Try out Buzzword.

Mozilla foundation also has announced its new project called Prism, which helps you to run the web applications as standalone desktop application. It works as a plug-in to the Firefox browser and let you access the web application just from the start-menu just like another application. I tried out the prototype which was released by mozilla foundation. It is really cool application which allows the applications like gmail, Google calendar,etc to run like desktop application.

With more and more applications getting on to the web, there wont be a need for a computer to access all your information. You just need a browser which will support the web application which you can even access it from your mobile phone. A very light-weight client with the access to the internet is very much sufficient to do most of your work. So all the big players are competing to capture this growing market and monetize on it.