The browser wars have been one of the best things that ever happened to computer users–but so far, they haven’t spilled over from the desktop onto phones. (Yes, there are multiple browsers available for many phone OSes, but there tends to be one 800-pound gorilla and a bunch of obscure alternatives.) So I’m glad to hear that Mozilla says it hopes to have Firefox up and running on Android by the end of the year…
Tag Archives | Web browsers
Decent Browser Coming to BlackBerries
More news from Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress: At a keynote by RIM’s Mike Lazaridis, he says that BlackBerries will get an all-new Web browser based on the same WebKit rendering engine used by the iPhone, Android phones, and Palm’s Web OS. It’s due later this year.
This demo shows both that the new browser looks like giant leap over RIM’s current, rudimentary one–and that the fact that most BlackBerries have small, non-touch screens still impacts the usability of browsing.
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Opera 10.5: Better and Chrome-ier
Norwegian browser company Opera has released a Windows beta of version 10.50–a follow up to 10.0, which shipped back in September. It’s definitely a beta–it’s not available at all for the Mac or Linux yet, and quirky enough that I couldn’t post this article using it–but it’s a promising one. And all the changes make Opera feel more like its much younger rival Google Chrome.
Opera’s makers are calling version 10.50 “the fastest browser on earth,” apparently based on the performance of its new JavaScript engine, which the company says is eight times faster than the old one. (The previous engine performed poorly compared to other browsers in the SunSpider benchmark test.) Judging browser speed based largely on JavaScript doesn’t make a lot of sense, but all of Opera’s competitors except Microsoft do it, too. (It may not be a complete coincidence that IE is the other browser besides Opera that lags in the SunSpider test.)
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5Words: New Stuff for Mac Chrome
Mac Chrome: extensions, bookmark sync.
Windows 8: supposedly mindblowing.
Rumor: Google just bought Aardvark.
Bill Gates critiques the iPad.
What’s TiVo announcing next month?
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Opera Mini on the iPhone? Good Luck (and I Mean That Sincerely)
Norwegian browser company Opera, which has been talking about an iPhone version since 2008, is no longer just talking. It says that it will demonstrate an iPhone edition of its Opera Mini phone browser next week at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. And that’s all it’s said so far.
Opera seems to be following the increasingly common strategy of publicly announcing it’s working on something interesting for the iPhone in hopes of making of more difficult for Apple to reject the program once it’s submitted. But if Apple did approve an alternative browser such as Opera Mini, it would be startling–it presumably incorporates a JavaScript interpreter, and that interpreter presumably violates a clause in the iPhone developer agreement that prohibits apps from including interpreters of any sort.
I hope, however, that Opera does submit Opera Mini, and that Apple startles us all by accepting it. The single most disturbing thing about the restrictions that Apple puts on iPhone developers is their tendency to eliminate applications that compete with Apple’s own software–it’s bad for iPhone owners. And ultimately it might be bad for Apple, if it tends to leave the company more complacent than if Safari and other programs faced competition on the iPhone itself.
Does the world need Opera Mini for the iPhone? Maybe: Mini is a fine basic browser on other phones, and it compresses Web pages on the server side in order to deliver the fastest possible rendering on the phone. Which might make it particularly useful when the best speed you can get out of AT&T’s network is pokey EDGE. Whatever Mini is, it isn’t a boring, pointless knockoff of Safari…
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The Future of Flash
Did irritation with Adobe Flash reach some sort of tipping point over the past few days? Probably not. But the heated debate about the near-pervasive plug-in for video, animation, and interactivity has made for fascinating reading.
When Steve Jobs sat on stage using an iPad that clearly didn’t support Flash, the discussion of Flash and iPhone OS instantly shifted from “Will Apple ever allow Flash on iPhone OS?” to “What does it mean for Flash that Apple will never allow it on iPhone OS?” to, in some cases, “What does it mean for the Web that Flash is on its way out?”
Over the weekend, dogpile on the rabbit syndrome set in. Adobe employees blogged in defense of Flash, but if the software got a stirring defense from anyone else, I didn’t come across it. Even the thoughts from Flash supporters tended to be bleak.
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Chrome and Windows 7 Rising
Web data company Net Applications has released its market share numbers for January. ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes notes that it shows Google’s Chrome with 5.2% of the browser market, and that Chrome appears to be stealing users from Firefox.
Technologizer’s Web stats are, of course, representative only of the Technologizer community–and this site is small enough that fluctuation is normal. (For instance, the percentage of visitors who use Macs varies a lot from month to month, which can skew browser data one way or the other.) But for what it’s worth, the last few months of usage data shows Chrome growing almost continuously, and Firefox jumping around in no clear pattern:
Chrome:
September: 9.05%
October: 8.93%
November: 9.69%
December: 12.65%
January: 14.03%
Firefox:
September: 45.79%
October: 41.35%
November. 42.09%
December: 45.46%
January: 41.43%
Net Applications’ January data also has ten percent of Web users on Windows 7. With Technologizer visitors, it’s sixteen percent–making Windows 7 the second-most used version of any operating system, after Windows XP, which 38 percent of you are still using…
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Two Firefox 3.6 Tips (Fullscreen, Tab Placement)
I’m generally well ahead of the crowd when it comes to Firefox. In fact, I’ve been running pre-release versions as my primary browser since the days when the Mozilla browser was known as Firebird. However, early versions of 3.6 were particularly crashy (along with the Flash 10.1 beta) and buggy in inconvenient ways (couldn’t access my work email due to some sort of cert issue). So I’ve largely abstained. And thus, have been uninformed. Two updates in particular have impacted my workflow – one positive, the other negative.
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Firefox 3.6 is Here
Today, Mozilla released Firefox 3.6, a new version of the world’s most popular alternative browser. (Come to think of it, though, the concept of “alternative browser” is stale–for one thing, on many sites, including Technologizer, Firefox is the most popular browser.)
On the grand continuum from inconsequential bug fix to massive upgrade, Firefox 3.6 isn’t a biggie. But it could be very worthwhile: Mozilla is claiming a 20 percent speed increase (including faster startup and JavaScript improvements) and more stability. I haven’t played with 3.6 enough to form my own conclusions other than “so far, so good,” but just about the only things I don’t like about Firefox are that it feels slow to load, sometimes seems to bog down, and freezes and/or crashes more than it should. A smoother-running Firefox could get me back on that browser more or less full time.
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Needed: An All-New Microsoft Browser
I tend to agree with Jason Cross’s contention that Microsoft’s browser would benefit from a reboot, not an update, and I like his proposals for doing so. (For the record, though, Ford is still flogging the Taurus–in fact, it tried to do away with it and then brought it back. Which is a sobering case study in how hard it is to reboot a venerable, pervasive brand.)