Prose Hacking

In this post for the Disruptive Competition Project, I take exception to the “Google is doing this to stick it to Apple” interpretation of the company’s forking the WebKit code into another open-source browser engine, Blink. I think this is good for Chrome users and good for the Web at large—and that if Google wants to subvert Web interoperability and sandbag Apple, there are other things you should watch out for.

This weekend’s USAToday.com column tackles a reader’s question about setting a browser besides Safari as the default in iOS (you can’t, but I don’t agree with the reader’s contention that it’s as bad as Microsoft’s IE favoritism in the late ’90s). Then it notes a somewhat hidden option to make Google’s Chrome browser disable Flash objects by default. Have you tried this click-to-play setting?

A USA Today reader asked that question, so I answered it. IE9’s cleaner UI, better standards compliance, upgraded security and improved Web-standards support all justify upgrading. The column goes on to suggest Google’s Chrome as a good alternative, then concludes by explaining how to use two new non-Google search engines as your default in Chrome.