Last week, Mozilla celebrated Firefox’s fifth birthday. While it may seem hard to believe that it’s really been that long since Firefox first burst onto the browser scene, it’s equally hard to understate just how important it has been for the development of the web. While IE is still the most popular browser, according to Net Applications, the browser market is much healthier than it was five years ago. Several major desktop and mobile browsers are in active development, notably IE, Firefox, the WebKit-based Apple Safari and Google Chrome, and Opera. The intense competition among these vendors is causing a climate of innovation, and the start of a new browser war.
So what might the future hold for browsers? In my latest Long View over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro, “What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?“, with comments from Chris Wilson (Microsoft), Chris Blizzard (Mozilla) and Bruce Lawson (Opera), I look at where this new browser war might lead, and the battlefields that it will be fought on: innovative new technologies, browser performance, security and privacy, and the ability to browse from multiple, diverse devices.
How do you think browsers will change over the next five years?
I’m in the middle of moving to new computers. Two of them. The laptop is easy. The desktop, well, that’s a story for another post. New and faster computers with a fresh install can compel a person to look up applications, plugins and other tools to boost web worker efficiency. Browser add-ons are a perfect example.
Quick overview for those new to Firefox: Add-ons are little free tools that make your application experience better and easier. Add-ons don’t stop at browsers, either. Email applications like Thunderbird have them, too. They’re very easy to install. Just go to Firefox add-ons, browse, click “Add to Firefox” and click “Install” in the popup window. Once installed, you’ll need to restart Firefox to complete the process.
Here’s my list of current favorites (note: if you like this list, be sure to check out the WebWorkerDaily Firefox Add-ons Collection): Read the rest of this entry »
Firefox 3.5 is a superb browser — the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine’s performance and memory management mean that it’s great for working with resource-heavy web apps. The Mozilla team has now released the first Release Candidate (RC1) of Firefox 3.5 to beta users, which means that the final release is probably not very far away.
I’ve been using the beta for some time now as my everyday browser. In my experience, the beta of 3.5 has been far more stable than 3.0, particularly when I have large numbers of web apps open, so I would recommend switching to 3.5 RC1 if you’re not using it already, even though it’s not the final version.
I ran the new RC1 through the Sunspider JavaScript benchmarks. It appears to be about 12 percent faster than beta 4, scoring a time of 2200 ms compared with beta 4’s 2500 ms, but as I didn’t run the tests in parallel you should take that with a large pinch of salt. While it’s not quite as snappy as Google Chrome (by far the quickest browser available, which scores 1500 ms, according to my benchmarks), this new version of Firefox is still a very fast browser. This improved performance, coupled with the ever-increasing bandwidth available to users, should give developers much more scope to create powerful web apps with desktop app-like capabilities — leading to many more useful web apps becoming available for web workers.
Have you switched to Firefox 3.5 yet?
The Google Chrome team has announced a new version of the open-source browser, touting up to 30 percent performance increases on JavaScript-heavy tasks. I’ve taken it for a spin, comparing it to Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, which also has very fast JavaScript performance thanks to its TraceMonkey technology. The new version of Chrome does indeed work faster than the Firefox beta at this point, and the performance is another way that Google’s browser is maturing and innovating.
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Ever find that little tool and think, “where have you been all my life?”
We’re constantly talking about ways of dealing with information overload, so it’s a happy day when a tool can truly make a difference. Today, that tool is Idea Shower’s ReadItLater.
Along the same lines as InstaPaper, LaterLoop and others, ReadItNow is simply a Firefox add-on that helps you save a list of pages for later reading. Better than regular old bookmarks, it’s for those pages you want to read when you have a moment but maybe not keep around forever.
ReadItLater has been around for over a year, but this week with version .99, it got insanely useful. I understand why other sites have been talking about it so much.
Read the rest of this entry »
There have been persistent – and reasonably credible – rumors that Google was going to release its own browser. Now, thanks to Google Blogoscoped, we have some additional evidence: a 38-page comic book sent out by Google to announce the Google Chrome project.
The comic runs through a bunch of interesting features: process-isolated tabs, a new Javascript engine tuned for large, complex applications (like, oh, GMail), UI innovations, an “Omnibox” that resembles Firefox’s “Awesome bar”, and more. The new browser is supposedly built on top of the Webkit rendering engine. Although this could be a (very elaborate) hoax, I’m inclined to believe it’s for real: the URL for Google Chrome is returning a custom 404 page, rather than the one Google uses for random words. I’m sure I won’t be the only web worker hoping to see a release here sooner rather than later.
Mozilla announced that Firefox 3 was downloaded 8 million times on its first 24 hours, setting a world record for the most software downloads over that period.
The record came despite its downtime for about two hours after site visitors overloaded its server. At its peak, the server was said to be serving 17,000 downloads per minute. Mozilla’s CEO John Lilly has a blog post that will give you more figures about the first 24 hours.
Downloads came from various parts of the globe, led by the United States, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Britain. The previous version of Firefox was downloaded just 1.6 million times in the 24 hours after its launch.
Mozilla said that Guinness World Records is reviewing the world record attempt and may take a few days before confirmation.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
