www.google.com\/googlebooks\/chrome\/<\/a><\/p>\nUnfortunately, neither Microsoft nor Google live up to their mission statements – at least, not without significant qualifications.<\/p>\n
The reason is simple. We expect a lot from a browser in terms of functionality. The average website displays multimedia and interactive content – it also does a lot more that is not visible. Unless you set your security controls unrealistically high, it loads cookies, scripts and reports back to some advertiser regarding aspects of your internet activity.<\/p>\n
The internet is, generally, not free anymore and advertisers pay for a lot of the content you consume as a user – they want their money’s worth from that.<\/p>\n
A browser has to handle an alphabet soup of protocols and a range of document and graphics formats. Most browsers are built to integrate with instant messaging and e-mail applications. The actual page content displayed is typically refreshed on-the-fly with unseen RSS feeds, among other technologies. On top of it all, the browser must deliver audio and video content – in the frame, not by calling up another application.<\/p>\n
The websites we access are not the static brochureware that we had 15 years ago. What you see in your browser is just the presentation layer of content coming from many sources, not only the company whose site you are on. It’s what is called a mashup. And we still expect a browser to display this quickly, easily and – let us not forget – securely. We then expect to open multiple sites in some form of tabbed browsing and move effortlessly between them.<\/p>\n
This is why Microsoft talks about standards. If we can work with common document formats, transport protocols and display technologies, it makes the browser’s job much easier. This is also why Google has cautionary tales about add-ons and plugins in its comic-book presentation.<\/p>\n
Both companies have adopted a browser architecture that partitions separate websites so that a failure on one site’s connection will not crash the whole browser – so they say. In practice, both companies’ browsers get into fatal error conditions.<\/p>\n
All software walks the tightrope between functionality and security – you cannot have 100% of both. So browsers have to use ActiveX controls and remote code execution, even though these can become vulnerabilities. This is analogous to leaving the window open all night for the cat. The solution is convenient but it creates a risk. So we add on burglar bars – a wide range of security limitations that block malware, buffer overflows, risky script permissions and so on. But we still expect the browser to work quickly.<\/p>\n
Subjective impressions<\/strong><\/p>\nIn the end, choosing a browser is art, not science – the real question is: what makes you comfortable? Different users have different priorities and it is not likely you can find a single browser that does everything you want with equal ability. You can bench-test them all and the unique advantages of each will be discounted against their problems.<\/p>\n
Here is a quick run-through of the major versions, in order of present market share.<\/p>\n
Internet Explorer (all current versions, 6 to 8) holds about 70% of the market. Run IE7 or IE8 on Windows Vista and you will see how the security has improved. You will see that improvement slightly less intrusively – and also less effectively – running on Windows XP. But there was still a recent vulnerability that could allow a malicious site to harvest passwords. And IE is a big lump of code – a significant install time and not a small amount of configuration is required for it to meet custom needs.<\/p>\n
Firefox holds just over 20% of the market, including the 2.0 and 3.0 versions. It seems to be lower in overhead than IE but still has a broad range of functionality. There are plenty of plugins available for custom needs but be careful what you add if security is a primary concern. This is a worthy descendant of the Netscape family and many users are quite comfortable with it.<\/p>\n
Safari comes in next at about 6,5% for all versions from 3.0 to 3.2. That percentage is slightly less than the market share for the Mac OS, which begs the question as to whether this browser really has a future on the PC platform. It has a pleasing user interface but can give problems with some content formats.<\/p>\n
The rearguard will be Opera and Chrome, both at about 0,7%. Everything else is below 0,5%. The advantage of these browsers is simplicity and a low system overhead but the downside is a lack of functionality – especially with Chrome. Tellingly, where Chrome’s functionality has improved, the result has been slower execution – and more frequent crashes. <\/p>\n
While a stoic person might say that it is not worth worrying about such niceties, it is worth noting that operating systems have followed a similar evolutionary path and what we have today is a far cry from where we began in the early 1990s. Progress in software often depends on borrowing ideas and winnowing out the products that reach a dead end.<\/p>\n
We have a natural expectation as users that a browser will either improve or perish in an obviously Darwinian manner.<\/p>\n
Why it matters<\/strong><\/p>\nOne thing that the commercialisation of the internet has given us is a wealth of studies and focus-group material that tells us what people really do – not just what we think they do.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of users, for work or play, will open a browser and an e-mail client before any other applications. Whether the goal is entertainment or business, the good or bad aspects of the user experience will be measured in terms of speed of access to the information requested – rather than the kaleidoscope of what the industry calls "rich content" that is beginning to be as annoying as the old banner ads and popups that once infested websites.<\/p>\n
Users are task-oriented and they don’t want to waste time waiting for pages to open or hitting "close" on a lot of unrequested advertising that blocks what they want to see.<\/p>\n
It is, however, pretty much inevitable that advertising won’t just vanish. On the public Internet and outside of purely academic or corporate sites, it is basically the same model as television – the ads pay for the content and the service you receive.<\/p>\n
This is something we have to live with but it is a critical problem for browsers that can’t take a "close" or new URL instruction while they are still busy trying to load those Flash animations and streaming video components. The more mainstream browsers tend to handle this problem better but the cost is more code and longer startup delays.<\/p>\n
The other thing about real users – and we are all guilty of this – is that all the dialogue boxes in the world won’t stop us doing something risky if we are in a hurry. And we are always in a hurry – instant gratification is the dominant paradigm. This means we will click on links, explore unfamiliar websites and use automated form completion features without really stopping to think about the risks. For that matter, how many of us have actually read a user licence agreement in full? This pattern of behaviour won’t change anytime soon.<\/p>\n
This combination of annoyance and exposure to security risks is no small matter if you take the latest trend into account. With Google leading the way and other vendors following close behind, there is a growing emphasis on live services, Web services, virtualisation of applications into hosted services that are only accessed on the internet – and even secure databases are now stored online.<\/p>\n
This is what the industry poetically calls cloud computing. It is not a castle built in the air either. To reduce the costs of licensing and the heavy expenditures on server farms, many organisations are taking this option very seriously.<\/p>\n
This means that the browser – as the gateway to the online information and services – has become as important as the operating system. It may even render it unnecessary to have more than a bare-bones OS. Anything you need to access or work with would be sourced through the browser.<\/p>\n
Even without using online services or storage, the browser has become the most important application we use. The foreseeable future is very much based on having common standards in place so that the browser workload is made more manageable – but using browsers that are even more ambitious in their functionalities.<\/p>\n
With that in place and the migration of productivity applications onto the internet – no longer resident on machines – the operating system would need to be little more than a thin-client system manager.<\/p>\n
The major software vendors are paying attention to this. Microsoft has a both-and approach, which looks to selling licensed products and online versions which are paid by subscription.<\/p>\n
The Google business model is based on advertising, rather than licensing products. The Google vision is to move computing onto the Internet, with no need for applications to reside on client machines – and not so much need for the heavyweight hardware and operating systems we use today.<\/p>\n
If Google is, as some say, the "next Microsoft", then the future is very much online, mobile – and probably based on equipment closer to a netbook than a workstation.<\/p>\n
Even if this trend takes years – as most do – and only becomes a significant part of the IT landscape, rather than a dominant force, it can be appreciated why the user interface with these online resources will be critical. That interface must be, as noted at the start of this article, fast, convenient, secure and flexible enough to handle multiple formats.<\/p>\n
Whether this will be a browser as we know them today is largely academic. Archaeopteryx is certainly no swan – but you wouldn’t have swans without their ugly ancestor.<\/p>\n
EngineerIT<\/em><\/p>\nBrowser discussion<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In this article we look at how browsers have developed and where they may be heading<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}