Everytime you surf towards a website, you send a lot of information about you towards that site. Your IP address and the browser you are using for example with the user agent string. Smart banners -independent of behavioral targeting with tracking cookies- is possible with this. But please google, when I visit gmail in a chrome browser, do not ask me to download chrome. And when I use a Mac, dont ask to me to use the MSI format for that.

Want to know what information you send and how unique you are for a website without using cookies? Visit eff's fingerprinting site.

I am, not the biggest fan of "Native Apps", e.g. applications that one has to install on you phone or tablet that are nothing more than a browser reading an RSS feed and displaying the results in a fancy way. Silos.

And ... without letting the user know, send lots of data of the tablet (location, contacts etc) to the mothership. Think about it, would you install "cnn.exe" on your windows host just to access one site? Would you download "microsoft.dmg" to see the website from the other side? Hell no, native apps must die, silos will fall down. I have been ranting about this for a long time, 2008, again and recent in my famous there is an app for that, it is called a browser post.

With progresive design being the standard and with modern mobile browsers honering the tags like VIDEO, a "HTML-Apps" will crush native apps. Not everybody shares that vision, but in broader sense it is clear that webapps will dominate above native apps in the mobile space; they are easy central to update and by definition cross platform.

As stated before, the browser is the OS.

If this is true, there is no reason to stop at a specific devices like a mobile. And indeed, Google docs replaced the office suite and as can be sen below, with pure HTML you can even do photobooth alike effects.

And now garageband is having a hard time with a browser based -less UI more interaction with friend- tool called jamwithchrome.
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One day, the browser will be the OS and we will all have big fat thin clients again with a mixture of local data and apps and remote data and apps. Al I wish for is that -despite the fact that I wish every company as much sicess as they can get- Google will not be the new Microsoft and Chrome not the new IE.

Google Maps done in ASCII art. See http://tllabs.io/asciistreetview/ for yourself, well done.

If you are using Google maps instead of open streetmap, you are still very bound to the standard color of Google maps. Or not?

No, Google even has a nice interface for changing the Google maps (api v3) colors. I dont know why this is so seldom used.

My name is.... Try to hear my out google. My name is... Not "soo cool". My name is... .... Never mind