Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 announced Chromeffects as an add-on for Windows 98

Windows 98

Windows 98 is a graphical operating system by Microsoft. It is the second major release in the Windows 9x line of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June 1998. Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid...

 to play 3D graphics and video through a web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

 or in separate player software, for ads with flashing text and other animation, or to generate user interface enhancements for Web-based applications.

Chromeffects promised to deliver complex multimedia over low-bandwidth connections. Using HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

, XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

, C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, VBScript

VBScript

VBScript is an Active Scripting language developed by Microsoft that is modeled on Visual Basic. It is designed as a “lightweight” language with a fast interpreter for use in a wide variety of Microsoft environments...

, and Jscript

JScript

JScript is a scripting language based on the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.JScript is implemented as a Windows Script engine. This means that it can be "plugged in" to any application that supports Windows Script, such as Internet Explorer, Active Server Pages,...

, developers would turn a web browser into a rippling, 3D space with audio and video playback. Later versions of Chromeffects were planned to have the ability to be used for representing databases in 3D.

A MacWeek

MacWEEK

MacWEEK was a controlled-circulation weekly Apple Macintosh trade journal based in San Francisco founded by Michael Tchong, John Anderson , Glenn Patch, Dick Govatski and Michael F. Billings. It featured a back-page rumor column penned by the pseudonymous Mac the Knife.Founded in 1987, it was...

 article from August 1998 quoted David Card

David Card

David Edward Card is a Canadian labour economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.Card earned his B.A. degree from Queen's University in 1978 and his Ph.D. degree in Economics in 1983 from Princeton University....

, an analyst at Jupiter Communications as saying, "Chromeffects is cool software, and it's not often I say Microsoft has cool software. Apple doesn't have anything comparable."

Chromeffects had problems with its business model, it was not intended to be a freely distributed technology, rather OEM PC manufacturers or other commercial entities would license the technology to provide to their customers as an IE add-on. However despite a hard marketing push in mid-1998, OEM interests never materialized and Microsoft canceled the project as part of a major internal reorganization in November 1998.

The Microsoft Liquid Motion

Microsoft Liquid Motion

Microsoft Liquid Motion was a product from Microsoft to create Java animations. It was based on technology acquired from Dimension-X. A beta was released in 1998, and version 1.0 was released soon thereafter to compete with Macromedia Flash. The product was eventually discontinued by Microsoft in...

 technology used Chromeffects "under the hood".

A similar newer modern initiative by Microsoft is Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, with features and purposes similar to those of Adobe Flash. The run-time environment for Silverlight is available as a plug-in for web browsers running under Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X...

.

External links

• Microsoft Debuts Chromeffects July 1998
• Microsoft Shelves Chromeffects November 1998