Programmatically Speaking ... : browser war

The (probably) never ending war of Chrome, FireFox, and IE

xxxd — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:34:00 GMT

Something interesting happened in October (yeh, stocks have been doing comparatively great): IE's share in global desktop browser usages has dropped to a perilous 52%. This, combined with its barely there mobile browser usage, brings its overall share below the 50% percentage mark.

Source: www.frelia.com

With interesting data invariably comes incessant probe of why.

Why so?

Some analysis pointed out the geek factor.

The tech community has abandoned IE in droves ever since they found the delicious toy of Firefox, which is dynamic and cool, decidely tech friendly and fast and active in development. It started the trend of multiple tabs, a wonderful array of extensions. It gives programmers Firebugs; Chrome joined the browser war in 2008, soon afterwards, tech people was attracted to it by its minimal interfaces and fast and smooth performance. Chrome came in late yet learn fast. It soon offered a wealth of tools and even more faster development cycle. I believe in no time, Chrome would reach 100 or Google (1 followed by 100 :)). Chrome also upended the browser game by building its V8 engine that fueled the Javascript engine speed war, throwing in its own script langauge.

More analysis dived into the browsers' differences in speed, interface, support for standards (ie., html5 and css3), privacy and security and Extensions.

In short, there is convergence among the browsers towards speedier, cleaner, more secure, and more customizable browsers. Surprise! With competition so fierce and stake so high, the best wins!

Speed-wise, Firefox and IE have greatly improved their speed so much so that Chrome actually is currently losing in this battle.

Interface-wise, Chorme started the minimumistic approach, Firefox and IE are taking notes. This minimum approach is actually catching fire in interface design. Google started it with its barebone google search, Facebook's home page also has the clean blue. Chrome, FireFox and IE also took great effor to allow tabs be informative yet non-obtusive, draggable and dockable. Work like a great app.

In terms of standards support, in the tech community, IE is always the object of ridicule. In support of HTML5 features, IE has been falling behind.

In extension offering, FireFox leads the way.

Under the hood - JavaScript Engines

JavaScript is currently the most important language. This in no small part is due to the quick rise and improvement of JavaScript engines, which in turn has made this browser war so intense and so interesting and so beneficial to all of us internet users.

The engine behind Chrome is V8 javascript engine. Copy Wikipedia here:

"V8 increases performance by compiling JavaScript to native machine code before executing it, rather than to execute bytecode or interpreting it. Further performance increases are achieved by employing optimization techniques such as inline caching. With these features, JavaScript applications running within V8 are said to have an effective speed comparable to a compiled binary."

Firefox has a rapid evolution line of JavaScript engine, started with Rhino, the very grandpa figure started at Netscape in 1997. After that, there are "monkeys" with mostly funny names: SpdierMonkey, TraceMonkey, JagerMonkey, IonMoney, then tamarin.

IE did not have any serious JavaScript engine until IE 9. Before that (IE 8 and earlier) it uses a script interpreter for running JavaScript. Now with IE 9 JavaScript engine, it provides features such as JavaScript background compliation and library optimization.

Parting words

So, in the global browser competition for more market share, IE is in steady decline yet still dominate the scene, FireFox is barely holding its ground, Chrome is rapidly rising. Still nothing is certain other than that the more they compete, the more we demand, the greater good will come out of it. Also, we, programmers, time to work harder to meet up the challenge.

Source:

Wikipedia: JavaScript Engine
The New JavaScript Engine in Internet Explorer 9
The End of an Era: Internet Explorer Drops Below 50 Percent of Web Usage
The End of an Era: Internet Explorer Drops Below 50 Percent of Web Usage
Chrome 10, Firefox 4.0, or IE9? The Browser Choice

Microsoft's Chinese problem with IE6

xxxd — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:08:00 GMT

Microsoft got to be so very tired of IE6, the once very popular child of their browser families, so much so that they set up a count-down website dedicated to the sole purpose of killing it.

Source: Microsoft IE 6 Count Down

Guess who is standing in the way? China. Chinese IE6 users have been trickling down, as of today it has about 28%. But 28% still makes a big bleeding heart in the above map. And any percentage of Chinese users can easily knock off the whole Europe or even America.

Right now the size of Chinese internet users stand at about 500 million users, and it is still growing. And its mobile users is even growing faster, it is estimated that the size of mobile users will surpass pc users as early as 2013.

Source: China Now Has Over 500 Million Net Users [CHART]

I can understand why the IE6 chinese users stick with IE6, because my parents are one of them. When they started gingerly with internet, I taught them to click the big blue E. They remembered ever since and they are afraid of making any changes, clicking on any popups that might bring in a flood of virus. The golden name of Microsoft somehow does not help much. Also, all they wanted is just to read their news, so why care about IE 6, or 7, or 9?

Ok, with that kind of mentality and the formiddable weight China carries, Microsoft has to continue its count down for at least a few years.

Source:

China Now Has Over 500 Million Net Users [CHART]
Microsoft IE 6 Count Down
Microsoft IE 6 Count Down
More Chinese netizens access internet via Mobile than PC

Firefox 7 and the speed war among browsers

xxxd — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:28:00 GMT

Was it just yesterday Mozilla released FireFox 7, was it just last month it released Firefox 6?

What is new in FireFox 7? Nothing you can see. But Firefox 7 is said to have reduced memory usage by 50 percent, which is great news if you have 16 tabs open all the time.Like me, whenever I checked my process memory usage, Firefox is always on top.

FireFox7 is said to have much sped up too.

Probably not that much, in this article, Browser Speed Tests: Firefox 7, Chrome 14, Internet Explorer 9, and More, guess who wins? Opera! Does anyone even use Opera? But Anyway, here are some simple and hard and cold facts:

Quote from the Article:

Obviously, there's a lot more to browser choice than speed—variety of extensions, customizability, and so on—but when it comes to performance, here's how our favorite browsers. We gave each contender a point value for its placing in each of the above tests, then tallied up the totals and divided them by the total number of points each could have received.

Opera 11.51: 82%
Firefox 7: 73%
Internet Explorer 9: 47.5%
Chrome 14: 43%