This article is part of a series on forgotten technology.
Sample of the DirectAnimation technology that was spun off Chromeffects.
Long before Google, Microsoft had a browser technology codenamed Chrome. It was a merging of 3D and web content, complete with XML-based modelling and hardware acceleration.
In July 1998, Microsoft announced the near-complete project under the name Chromeffects. A SDK was released, partners were prepped for an imminent launch. And then Chromeffects disappeared without a trace.
A lot of bling for a little band
So what went wrong? To answer that, let’s begin with what Chromeffects was meant to be. In 1998, the web was still fresh and bandwith was low. Most people were still on 28.8 modems, and broadband was a futuristic dream.
At the same time, 3D accelerator cards were beginning to take off. For the first time, you could have reasonably smooth texture-mapped animation without punishing the processor too heavily.
Microsoft figured that you could improve the web experience with client-side graphic effects. These effects would involve only a little markup, with most of the code already installed on the browser.
At the simplest level, web designers could add 3D transitions like ripples and page curls with a touch of markup, much like CSS styles. Chromeffects could also draw full-blown 3D objects, which were defined with a proprietary XML-based language.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of Chromeffects was to map live web content onto 3D surfaces. Video streams could also be used in the same way. One simple demo was a 3D cube which the user could spin, with a different web page on each surface.
An obvious use for these effects was advertising, with mentions of animated 3D banners. Web applications were also appearing on the scene, and there was talk of using animation to enhance web UIs. Another proposed use was 3D visualization for databases.
The makings of a ruin
Although 3D hardware was picking up, effects such as these required the very latest gear: a 300 MHz Pentium II, 65 megabytes of memory and an AGP graphics card.
Here, then, was the first issue: you couldn’t install Chromeffects on most computers of the time. In fact, Microsoft decided to make it an OEM installation only, and an optional one at that.
By November, the plan had changed to making Chromeffects a part of Windows 98 SP1, but by then everything was basically over. Microsoft had a major internal restructuring, and the project fell by the wayside.
Another thing that may have contributed to the fall of Chromeffects was pressure from other browser manufacturers and the W3C. After all, this was the time when the Department of Justice was coming down on Microsoft for bundling IE with Windows.
A brand new bundled media technology in Windows did not look good for Microsoft. Furthermore, Chromeffects was seen as competing with such key technologies as Java and RealPlayer.
The leftovers
What remains of Chromeffects? Not much. Parts of it, like DirectAnimation and DXTransform, made it into IE5. These techniques added animation capabilities, but they were little used. DirectAnimation was discontinued in IE7 because of security issues.
Now in 2010, 3D on the web is once again trendy. Apple has released 3D transformations for CSS, which share a lot of the same low-band effect thinking as Chromeffects. Mozilla and Khronos are working on a web version of OpenGL called WebGL.
And Microsoft, of course, is busy bringing 3D to Silverlight. With hardware acceleration, and all that.