Like 1995 all over again!

Wow – the browser wars are back with a bang! We wait ages for a new version of Internet Explorer and then two come at once (almost). There’s a nice summary on the Register this morning about the new versions of various browsers. If you’re in the mood you can download:

• Chrome (Win)
• Firefox 3.0.7 (Any)
• Safari 4 beta (Mac + Win)
• Opera 9.6 (Any)
• Internet Explorer 8 (Win)

The interesting part is that the chosen battleground at the moment is JavaScript. (I guess people care less about standards than we all thought). As the Register article shows, people are trumpeting the various JavaScript engines as being significant new features. They are interesting in abstract, but what people care about is:

• Does it help me do what I want to do?
• Does it do cool stuff

The cool stuff tends to come first – for example the Register article links to a couple of cool Google Chrome Experiments:

• A bouncing ball
• A gravity effect on the Google home page

These are clever demonstrations of JavaScript coding using the new <canvas> tag. I had never heard of canvas before this morning, but it looks like it has been around for a bit. It is part of the emerging new standards (HTML 5) for web development and these experiments work on newer browsers. They both worked fully on Safari 4 for me, the gravity effect was patchy in Flock (based on Firefox 3). Even though I knew nothing about <canvas> before, I’m interested now.

New browser – shiny but not polished

I’ve been playing with the new beta of Google Chrome. In case you missed it, Chrome is their new web browser entering into a crowded market. Last time I checked, Firefox and IE were still dominating market share (especially Firefox according to w3schools.com). So do we need a new browser, and what difference does it make for designers?

In terms of features, Chrome has excellent speed and JavaScript performance. This is evident from a quick play and is certainly the claimed design goal. Google is banking on us using Chrome and making use of their online apps such as gmail and writely. This doesn’t seem to be a prelude to a lock-in (ActiveX style) as the browser is open source and based around the standards-compliant WebKit engine (the same one Apple uses for Safari, and incedentally the same browser as used on the iPhone).

Right now – features are light (much as Firefox was at the start). I miss the integration with del.icio.us, facebook and other sites that I have in my regular browser (Flock). Worse still there is no Mac version (boo!). I’m sure Google will say that the lack of cruft and features gives them a speed advantage. Should you switch? I’m staying put for now, but I’ll play around some more with it. Maybe when it comes out of Beta (that’s a joke by the way).

Go-faster stripes

Slashdot has a discussion today about optimising your web sites for speed. The analysis is by Aaron Hopkins of Google. There is some detailed research on page load times, and the effects that lots of small graphics in pages can have.

There is plenty of detail – and this is more advanced than I would expect for any of your assignments, but if you are looking to write web sites for a living, you should look at this. There are also some hints towards the end on how you can speed up your browser. The simplest trick is to turn on the Keep-alive property which helps when you are fetching lots of items from the same web server. If you are a Firefox user, you can always try the FasterFox plugin.

Firefox 2.0

Mozilla has launched version 2.0 of its browser this week. My first impression is that it is more like version 1.6 than 2.0. The new features are not really dramatic enough to merit a whole point release. See this brief article on Webmonkey as a starting point.

Monkey Bites

Firefox has always claimed to be a stripped down browser, with extra functionality added using the plugin mechanism. If you keep the product simple, producing a 2.0 version with a big fanfare is hard to achieve without compromising the keep it simple approach.

technorati tags:firefox, browsers

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