Submitted by “Poor Microsoft. This week, the Redmond, Wash., giant is gearing up for the next big release of its Web browser, a leap from Internet Explorer 7 to IE 8. When open-source competitor Mozilla released its last update of Firefox in June, the Web went wild: People downloaded more than 8 million copies in 24 hours. Microsoft’s release might not have such a frat party feel. Even as it gears up to release IE 8, the developers behind the Firefox Web browser are experimenting with a new technology that sharpens the threat their browser software poses to Microsoft’s most valuable businesses. The new technology, dubbed TraceMonkey, promises to speed up Firefox’s ability to deliver complex applications.” While many have abandoned Microsoft’s browser offerings, Microsoft will be introducing an innovative new type of selective privacy mode called InPrivate with IE8.
The Monkey On Microsoft’s Back
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive o Web Developer o Father o Foodie o Music Snob o OS enthusiast
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MS is playing catch up, but any and all improvements are greatly appreciated to what is still the most used browser by far, and IE8 has got a lot of them.
And I am way more interested in the webkit javascript efforts then the mozilla ones. We are gearing up for the next iteration of the browser wars, and this time around my money is on webkit.
Yes and no doubt my wife who uses Firefox will get IE8 automatically and have it put itself on the desktop and quick launch without he saying so.
I bet this will be the third time she’s had to remove it being as it seems to detect if it’s there or not, if you start IE up for some reason.
Er … since she already knows to simply click the Firefox icon instead of the IE icon … what the hell does it matter if the icon “installs itself on the desktop” … just ignore it.
That doesn’t make it any less stupid, does it?
Although the perception is that IE is “still the most used browser by far” this is a misleading perception as far as the creation of web pages go.
IE 6, IE 7 and IE 8 all behave fifferently. A web designer has to take those differences into account. This makes for a lot of work and testing.
Firefox, Opera and Safari all behave differently as well, but are still less problematic that IE. It is possible by sticking to a subset of W3C standards to write even relatively complex web pages that will work without modification on all three.
The day will not be far off when a web designer can write a page without any tests for the client browser, test it once for standards compliance, and be assured that it will work correctly on the majority of client browsers and only IE might have a problem …
Absolutely correct. The Internet Explorer family of browsers may have more market share than the rest, but individual versions are not particularly dominant relative to each-other and Firefox. This means that every web developer should be striving for W3C compliant pages. Targeting a specific browser version is folly these days as the top three (IE6, IE7, Firefox 2) have roughly the same level of adoption.
Here are some numbers to back this up. This is just a random site I googles, I’m sure many sites are similar give or take a few percentage points. Also note that the use varies across the world (Firefox is particularly strong in parts of Europe) http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Note around one-third of users are still using IE6. That may be because their company requires it, or they don’t know (or care) how to upgrade. Most importantly, these may not be the savvy market-segment (the ‘influencers’) you would prefer to reach with your website. So that means you have to make sure your website works with both Firefox (for the smart folk) and the various IE versions.
To target IE-only is a foolish, and unnecessary, mistake people made in the past and are paying for now (since they have to pay to update their sites for other users).
Also, Flash nor Silverlight (or JavaFX or applets, etc) are nice for multi-media stuff that consumers like to watch without paying for it. Meanwhile the corporates (and governments) are continuing to the web as the zero client-side deployment is something they don’t want to give up (which is why Silverlight will very likely be dead-in-the-water for most big organisations with vast numbers of marginally-proficient IT users).
Hmm… lets see if I understand this correctly,
MS’s strategy for complex web applications will be silverlight. Silverlight uses .net languages like C# on the client side with nice vector graphic, XML based UI elements, yet some how, turbo charging javascript for javascript based applications is going to kill MS?
The world is moving toward Flex and Silverlight for web application delivery. I don’t think MS is really that worried about a super bump in javascripts speed on Firefox.
“The world is moving toward Flex and Silverlight for web application delivery. I don’t think MS is really that worried about a super bump in javascripts speed on Firefox.”
Not really. If this were the case then the massive amount of Ajax based apps would not exist. Something like TraceMonkey greatly expands the capability of Ajax based apps.
The other thing is, JavaScript is completely free to develop with, with tools for all platforms (free and proprietary) and runs in all browsers.
While you can do Flex and Silverlight development with just the SDKs, that is no small chore. To be truly productive, you need good tools. In both cases, the tools are quite expensive (FlexBuilder and Expression Blend, respectively), and in the case of Silverlight, the tools only run on Windows.
Finally, both Flash and Silverlight are big CPU hogs, and are known to crash browsers.
In other words, Ajax/Javascript based web apps aren’t going away any time soon, and stuff like TraceMonkey, and Google Gears, make them all the more compelling.
Flexbuilder 3 is 249 USD, in case you use it professionally, it’s not really expensive.
I’m using the free Educational license.
I believe MS has free educational license for Expression as well. If you buy it, it’ll cost you 500 USD though.
You call 250USD “not expensive”? Hogwash! Maybe compared to the massively overpriced multi-thousand-dollar dev kits it’s not expensive, but allow me to enumerate the price of the competition:
0 USD
I can write JS, use SVG and canvas without paying a dime. Give me any text editor, or in a pinch I’ll do it long-hand on a sheet of paper!
Relegating development to something you must be a professional *before* you attempt is somewhere between stupid and suicide. If the average person cannot just “try it out” and see if they can make it work then far, far fewer things get written. If a freelance or part time programmer who is not dedicated to web development can’t just whip something up real quick then it wont get used.
uh-huh.
The features and vertical integration with current production make Flex and Siliverlight, going forward, more appealing (especially silverlight). The language features that Silverlight will expose to web development will far surpass anything that javascript and google gears can provide.
Javascript will, in a few years, be going out of style for Web application developers.
what is appealing is the large number of extensions for firefox. For example, in IE8 there is a new feature called “Activities”? Well, there already is a firefox extension duplicating that feature.
And of course there is adblock. I don’t understand how anyone can tolerate using any browser without adblock.
Some of us want the sites we visit to have a source of revenue.
Some of us don’t want our compy to owned by a zero-day riding around in a flash file.
Flash is a major security threat to a computer.
Hey, and for that matter – if I don’t have flash installed, or have it switched off; how am I “blocking” their adverts? They chose an advert delivery mechanism that I don’t have.
Remember – as ubiquitous as Flash is. It’s still optional.
Exactly. Also, if you insist that your favorite website has to show ads for you to click on, there’s a whitelist feature in AdBlock Plus that can make exceptions for it (for instance, no filtering for a particular website). So there.
Yes, but he didn’t say flashblock, he said adblock, which blocks image and text ads as well. How are images and text dangerous for your computer? And if the stuff on the website you are looking with is dangerous, maybe you should consider visiting a different competitor instead of not paying the requested form of subscription for that website (advertisements)
Ads pay bills, its a packaged deal since they are not charging you ANYTHING for viewing the material on the website. And when they do offer paid subscriptions the website material, the people who block the ads are always the first one complaining about that too! There were a few sites I visited that had really obnoxious ads and I thought about getting adblock, but I realized the right thing to do was to stop visiting their website and support someone who has more friendly ads, and if enough people do that, it would give them the message.
Do you really expect all those people using a browser on, say, PDAs, mobile phones or games consoles to ditch their platform of choice and use a PC, just because a website or two uses Silverlight?
Not going to happen.
Silverlight, like Flash, can not possibly be supported as widely as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript already are. An increasing number of web browsers are not based on desktop OSes, so Microsoft really don’t have enough pull anymore to push people into using Silverlight.
Besides, you sound like someone who’s never really used JavaScript. It’s a great language – the only thing that really causes problems is IE’s slow and buggy JScript engine.
It’s also kind of hard to argue that JavaScript is going to be made irrelevant in favour of Flex and Silverlight when Flex uses ActionScript (a JavaScript variant), and Silverlight is currently uses the browser’s JavaScript engine for scripting support.
(bold added by me)
That’s awesome, just from an English construction perspective.
I have used it and I tolerate it.
Thanks.
when exactly was the last time a cell phone, PDA or game console was used to do something that could be considered a complex web application? We are talking about apps that have the functionality of a desktop program, not simply serving up information.
I am not trying to argue that Javascript is a dead tech, I am arguing that a speed boost in javascript that is touted as being a killer for complex web applications, is nothing of the sort.
I can’t wait for JS to work faster on all teh web 2.0 sites I visit, it will make them operate faster. Javascript is not an ideal platform for applications that replace desktop installed apps.
The future is now.
The only other thing that causes problems is that serious programmers for many years did not touch the client web. As such most javascript has been, until recent years, written by (no offense) amateurs. The large amount of poorly written, buggy JS code scattered around the web tended to give the language itself a bad reputation.
In the last 5 years or so this has really changed. Workarounds for commonly encountered bugs and time-saving utility functions have evolved into high-level toolkits. 10 years ago I would have welcomed the fiery death of javascript in favor of any other answer. Today it has been proven that the language is not bad (in fact, it’s really awesome) it’s just the use of it that has been bad.
they should have dumped JS for Python or Perl long ago. At least make it a web standard so borwser makers will include them.
Again, no. JS is, as it turns out, not a bad language. In fact it’s got a lot of really fantastic stuff! It’s mostly been bad JS programmers giving it a bad name (but it doesn’t help that the JS language has been evolving and interpreters have been improving).
I don’t know that JS would be good for everything, but it’s certainly good in the browser.
Replacing it would only make matters worse even if the replacement were purely better in every regard.
That is why they should add to the languages you could use.
Python would quickly supplant JS if it was in all browsers.
Hello,
I’m constantly hearing that Mozilla improves JavaScript’s perfomance for their products. With performance they mean execution time.
But does these enhancements also need less CPU performance?
If yes that would be a major selling point for me.
Except JavaScript isn’t the bottleneck here: the NETWORK is the bottleneck. Which means that improvements in JavaScript, while nice, won’t really do much as a percentage of browsing cost.
as far as the broswer wars go, this pretty much sums up my feelings.
http://xkcd.com/198/
from the comic:
What, there is also some life outside of the web browser I’m staring at each day..?!?
As a more serious note, with the exponential growth of the Internet, web browsers (mobile and desktop versions) have become quite important pieces of software. If you asked lots of people what computer program they would give up last, quite a large percentage would probably choose web browsers as their most important programs. With your web browser you can use more and more online applications too, not just browse web pages or read email, and browsing Internet is often the first source of information these days. Organizations are moving more and more of their information online and have less paper documents and so on.
Edited 2008-08-26 22:40 UTC
Personally, I hate firefox. I find it buggy, slow, a memory hog, and ugly as sin. HOWEVER, as much as I hate firefox, I absolutely adore firebug and cannot imagine web development without it, so it is typically my browser of choice.
I compared firefox vs IE on a dancing animated gif. There was no need to benchmark; firefox was so much faster that it was like comparing a movie to a slideshow.
i dont compare it to IE, bad gif support is the tip of the iceburg there.
IMO the next browser war is going to be between opera and webkit. IE is just too far behind feature wise, and firefox is way too bloated
opera and webkit war for what? for 1% of the market?
iPhone anyone? And pretty much every Nokia uses WebKit as well… When ppl are going to browse the web more and more with mobile devices, EEE pc’s etc, MS dominance will further dwindle.
This thread is about Webkit and Opera, not MS dominance!
EEEs come with Firefox, Nokia has been working on a Qt port of Firefox (which will benefit Fennec), I can predict seeing more Gecko renderers on Nokia phones soon.
If it’s about WebKit and Opera, how is MS’ dominance on the browsermarket not relevant?
Anyway, yeah, you’re right. We’ll definately see more of the two FOSS engines, WebKit and Gecko. Which was my point as well. Not sure if Nokia will use Gecko more, but with he recent Qt port of Mozilla, they might.
Try some of these:
http://maketecheasier.com/28-coolest-firefox-aboutconfig-tricks/200…
#13, #12 and #2 should help.
As far as prettiness goes, there is a great deal of choice here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:2
These are the popular choices:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=&cat=2%2C0&as=…
Even someone as hard-to-please as yourself should find something to suit.
You can even make it look just like IE7:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4583
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4988
or somewhat like an OSX application:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6124
Enjoy.
Hey guys. If you disagree with a post, please state your reasons for disagreeing. Don’t just mod the post into oblivion in the online equivalent of a drive by shooting.
Webkit is, indeed, likely to give the Mozilla guys a run for their money. Competition ensures that the king of the mountain can’t get too fat and complacent.
if you bash certain things around here, people will mod you down, and firefox is one of those things.
Edited 2008-08-27 19:38 UTC
And yet the message they are sending is that they lack confidence in it. People who have true confidence in the product they are promoting don’t act in such an oversensitive way. They confidently present their facts, instead.
Edited 2008-08-27 20:05 UTC
SBergman wrote:
–“Hey guys. If you disagree with a post, please state your reasons for disagreeing. Don’t just mod the post into oblivion in the online equivalent of a drive by shooting.”
definately agree with that, and I don’t see why google ninja’s posts would be modded down. that said, ‘firefox is ugly’, ‘firefox is bloated’, are pointless statements, equivalent of ‘it sucks!’. either offer up some actual facts supporting your statements, or it’s just another bunch of fanboy/anti-application-x rant.
-‘firefox is ugly as sin’
now I’ve only tried the Linux and Win32 versions of Firefox 3 and in my opinion they do a good job of blending with the corresponding environment. in no way do I think it’s a great looking application, but were exactly is it ‘ugly as sin’?
-‘firefox is way too bloated’
in what respect is it too bloated? have you compared the memory usage with other browsers or are you just guessing? this benchmark test (which was linked here on OSAlert iirc) shows quite the opposite.
http://dotnetperls.com/Content/Browser-Memory.aspx
I’m all for discussion and argumentation, but lets
argue with the basis on facts. if you have data showing Firefox to be bloated in comparison with other browsers then please show that data as that would be a great basis for discussion, saying -‘firefox is way too bloated’ isn’t.
Well, from the early MS DOS days to the days of MS Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft has known that doing successful business and being a market leader doesn’t mean that you would also have to have the technically best product to offer for your potential customers. That is the playing field they master.
Doing aggressive business and, on the other hand, developing good software are two different fields, not necessarily in any way related.
…just to be fair I have to add that, for example Microsoft usability design has often been quite good, both in its software & hardware development and also often when compared to many competitors.
Nobody is going to buy or use complete rubbish voluntarily, how ever aggressive business tactics you used… (I hope?)
Also Microsoft web browsers have had quite good usability. It is the traditionally rather poor MS IE / Windows security and the old MS tendency to support its own proprietary “standards” instead of open web standards that has caused lots of troubles to many web users.
But yet again, I guess nobody can deny that the most important reason why Microsoft has gained its monopoly position in the market (OS, browsers and lots of other software) is not the usability of its products or anything like that but indeed its traditionally very aggressive business tactics. And I haven’t yet seen any real signs of that MS business culture changing radically yet.
Edited 2008-08-27 19:23 UTC
Being Microsoft they don’t need a lot of excitement to get people to upgrade. Eventually it will appear as a recommended update on Windows update and people will be like, “Hey there is a new browser on my PC.” Hard to fight automatic updates.
Well, at least it’s better than the Apple way of trying to slip Safari onto people’s computers as part of a Quicktime update
“TraceMonkey: JavaScript Lightspeed
I’m extremely pleased to announce the launch of TraceMonkey, an evolution of Firefox’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1 that uses a new kind of Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to boost JS performance by an order of magnitude or more. ”
-Brendan Eich
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey…
..the business.
They are just giving people what they want, as usual. Or at least this time they’ve done some solid R&D, and, surprise, they evalutated that what people really WANT these days, is privacy, so they put it into a product and are going to go on campaign with it now.
Just that this time, they had to Do As We Said (TM), because the time of feeding bull to people is over and it’s time to really deliver what people actually want.
Lot of talk here about the rekindling of the browser wars. Maybe I’m blind, but I don’t see it. 80% of the population is going to use IE simply because it come installed on Windows. They just don’t care.
Now on the off chance that either Linux or Mac become the dominate OS or Website start requiring Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. you might see another browser war that includes Microsoft, but both scenarios are unlikely to happen anytime in the next five years.
I personally prefer Firefox and Opera, but Safari isn’t all that bad. IE 8 is far better than previous versions, but still seems outdated (big surprise).
Firefox usage alone is already over 20%.
The usage of IE6 is in decline, and the uptake of Firefox is currently higher than IE7 and increasing at faster rate.
Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc are all converging on a common set of standards. For example, they all comply with Acid2 and all have far better compliance with Acid3 than does IE. IE does not even render SVG, for example, and its implementation of Javascript is out of kilter with the rest.
So it is more a case, in any potential future re-incarnation of “browser wars” to be a case of the “W3C-compliant allies” (goodies) versus IE (baddies). Websites written to the standards will render fine on all of the others but may very well have trouble only on IE.
Javascript becoming fast will mean that Ajax will be able to handle complex web applications as well as silverlight, but not require any proprietary extensions and work on all browser (but probably least well on IE).
Since Firefox on Windows is clearly by far a better browser than IE on Windows, as is Safari and Opera, this “war” is by no means the forgone conclusion that you seem to imply it is.
Edited 2008-08-27 02:45 UTC
So it is more a case, in any potential future re-incarnation of “browser wars” to be a case of the “W3C-compliant allies” (goodies) versus IE (baddies). Websites written to the standards will render fine on all of the others but may very well have trouble only on IE.
Standards compliance is all well and good. Now the trick is for all the browsers to gain non-standards compliance for all of the frustrating but unavoidable sites designed for IE’s idiosyncrasies.
Marketshare is more of a solution for that then making browsers work with broken code. Firefox is up to 50% in a couple of countries, up to 30% in Europe. Any company making a site that doesn’t work with Firefox these days are shooting themselves in the foot.
You say that like it’s an established fact. Hint: It isn’t. It’s nothing more than pure speculation.
It is slightly more than simply “pure speculation”. All of the various published attempts at measuring “browser market share” agree on those trends. They don’t agree on the actual numbers, admittedly, and in fact there is wild variation … but nevertheless there is strangely enough solid agreement on those particular trends.
Edited 2008-08-28 03:18 UTC
The next browser war is not between browsers, it’s between content delivery mechanisms. It’s standards vs. Silverlight vs. Flash/Flex/AIR.
All browsers run these, therefore the playing field has been levelled such that the new war takes place on the foundations of the previous war. (That is, within the browsers, not the browsers themselves).
Mark me up for HTML5/CSS3/SVG/JS. I’m not touching any of the other “solutions” with a barge-pole.
Hear hear.
TraceMonkey is going to be amazing.
How fast is it? About as fast as VB6. Slow for a compiled .exe, but unbelieavably fast for Javascript.
This is going to make webpages feel snappier and more responsive than anything Microsoft can offer with IE/Silverlight. Responsiveness is what matters to end-users, not bling that takes forever to get started.
“an innovative new type of selective privacy mode”
Uhmm, blah blah blah, thanks but no thanks.
Faster JS is a boost for me as a FF user and web dev but it’s not the reason I will continue to use it. FF has always tried to position itself as a safe browser. So while the world suffered from popups, viruses, badly behaved active-x controls and the like, I happily browsed the web in relative security. (I said relative)
Add to that the goal of standards compliance, great developer tools, and addons from an active user community and you have the best browser experience on the planet. Even though it is written in java, I forgave it of its sins and still use it everyday for everything.
Therefore I don’t use IE for all the reasons mentioned above. Authors talk like IE is going to die – it won’t (unfortunately). But that doesn’t mean you personally have to use it.
Interesting new technology coming out of Mozilla Labs…
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080827-ubiquity-prototype-le…
(all magic worked and extensible using JavaScript
)
Now, the emphasis on dramatically faster JavaScript performance in both web pages rendering, but in the future, also in all parts of Firefox has yet another good justification for it
.
It’s open source. You can look for yourself. There is no Java in FF.
The core is C++ and the UI is Javascript.
Where did you get the idea that it’s written in Java?
You mean it’s just slow because it’s slow? How shocking! I suppose I don’t have java to blame.
I use Firefox because its fast, tabs work well and because of firebug. IE7 is useless. Opening a tab is an excersize in frustration.
Having said that IE7 is more secure than Firefox. Firefix was heavily promoted as being the safe alternative but the reality is IE7 is more secure. It also runs in a sand box unlike other browsers. It looks like IE8 is going t be significantly faster and more standards compliant. But they have a long way to go if they are to catch the competition.
I’m not sure WTF that means. You click on the blank tab. Done. That’s it. Congratulations, you opened a tab. Objectively, was that really an “excersize in frustration”? I think not.
MS really seems to be coming along well in terms of their web technologies. After the utter abortions that were Internet Explorers 5 and 6, MS finally delivered something nice, clean, fast and standards-friendly with IE 7. While I use FF out of habit and to make life easy on myself (I use Linux and home and Windows at work and Firefox is available on both), I really can’t diss IE7. While not as good as Opera or WebKit, it still strikes me as roughly equivalent to Firefox/Gecko in terms of standards compliance and accuracy.