Will new browsers really upgrade the Web?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: bobr () bobrosenberg phoenix az us
Date: June 17, 2009 1:51:12 PM EDT
To: "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>

--  
Bob Rosenberg
P.O. Box 33023
Phoenix, AZ  85067-3023
Mobile:  602-206-2856
LandLine:  602-274-3012
bob () bobrosenberg phoenix az us



June 17, 2009 4:00 AM PDT
Will new browsers really upgrade the Web?
by Stephen Shankland
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10266230-2.html?tag=nl.e703

Mozilla is exhorting users to "upgrade the Web" with Firefox 3.5 and  
variations on
that better-browsing theme can be found with Google's Chrome, Apple's  
Safari, and
Opera.

The hope is that the Web will evolve from a series of relatively  
static pages to a
lively home for Web applications--everything from today's e-mail to  
tomorrow's
spreadsheets. But it could take awhile for reality to catch up with  
the vision.

It's indeed a bright, shiny future for browsers, and the avant-garde  
is advancing
rapidly. Web developers eager to invigorate their Web sites or build  
fancy Web
applications have to reckon not only with the massive, slower-moving  
army of
ordinary Web browsers, but also with inconsistent support for the  
latest technology.

Browsers of the future
Many of new browser features stem from HTML 5, the still-not-finalized  
next
iteration of the HyperText Markup Language standard that defines how  
Web pages are
described. HTML 5 has spurred the arrival of built-in video and audio,  
local storage
that Web sites or applications can use, "Web workers" that can perform  
background
processing tasks for a Web application, drag-and-drop for better user  
interfaces,
and other technologies.

That's not all. Also on the frontier:

• Faster JavaScript--the language that powers Web applications such as  
Google
Docs--is a public priority for all the top browsers except Microsoft,  
and
performance has surged in the last year.

• Google wants browsers to use computers' processing power with Native  
Client and O3D.

• Through Opera Unite, Opera wants browsers to host their own  
applications by
turning the browser into a server others can visit.

• And a variety of other standards--CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and  
SVG (Scalable
Vector Graphics)--stand to improve browsers' graphical sophistication.

• Geolocation technology can, with the your permission, let a Web site  
know where
you are to tailor location-specific content accordingly.

Bumps on the HTML 5 video road
The case of video support is illustrative. HTML 5 includes the "video"  
tag, which
holds the potential to make video as routine and easy to handle as  
images have been
for more than a decade on the Web. Instead of having to rely on a  
browser plug-in
such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player, Microsoft's Silverlight, or  
Apple's Quicktime,
video becomes a native part of the Web.

In theory at least. In practice, HTML 5 video is rough around the edges.

One of the biggest issues is inconsistent standards support. For  
images, most
browsers get by fine with JPEG, GIF, and PNG formats. But in video,  
Mozilla has
built in support for Ogg Theora, while Safari and Chrome are inclined  
toward the
H.264 standard. The former may be distributed without licensing and  
royalty
constraints, but the latter is more widely used to supply video  
content today.

So, for example, video site DailyMotion is transcoding its 300,000  
videos to Ogg,
but at least for now, only Firefox will play them in that format.  
Other browsers
revert to Flash, so the site still functions without Ogg support, but  
that's status
quo for the Web. Is it the job of the operating system, a plug-in, or  
the browser to
supply video-decoding software?

HTML video does offer a significant departure from Flash's embedded  
rectangular
boxes, and it's arriving on advanced mobile devices such as Apple's  
iPhone and
Google Android phones that presently lack Flash support.

"You can start to get the Web page interacting with the video,"  
Firefox Director
Mike Beltzner said in an interview Tuesday. For example, one video can  
be embedded
within another, and JavaScript can control the video. In one  
demonstration, a
face-recognition software learned who was in a running video, then  
identified those
individuals later.

A different problem afflicts local storage, which lets browser-based  
applications
store data on a person's PC or phone, for example letting Gmail work  
even without a
network connection. The technology derived from Google's Gears  
project, which
embedded the SQLite database software, but others have questioned  
whether SQL's
syntax is the best interface for Web developers. Even relying on  
SQLite as a
standard doesn't guarantee compatibility because browsers can use  
different
versions, Beltzner observed.

Refresh rate
It doesn't just take time for standards to be hashed out. It takes  
time for users to
update to new browsers and for Web developers to decide there's  
critical mass to
support them.

The most notable example is Internet Explorer 6, which initially  
shipped in 2001 and
still is in widespread use. IE overall has 66 percent market share,  
according to Net
Applications' May 2009 statistics; IE's share breaks down to 41  
percent for IE 7, 17
percent for IE 6, and 7 percent for IE 8.

Web programmers long have bemoaned IE 6. There's a Stop IE 6 campaign.  
More
recently, John Martz attracted attention with his cartoon message  
created for use
when IE 6 users visit the Momentile Web site; it depicts various  
browsers in the
treehouse spurning IE 6.

One of the benefits of Adobe's Flash is that it sidesteps some of  
these issues. Of
course, it's a proprietary plug-in, not an open standard, which raises  
some
developer hackles. But Flash works the same on different browsers and  
different
operating systems, and Adobe has a reliable mechanism to upgrade users  
relatively
swiftly to the latest version.

"Flash's success paints a target on its back," Adobe blogger John  
Dowdell said in a
blog post about Mozilla's publicity pitch. "'Upgrading the Web' is  
what happens with
each new Flash generation."

But browsers are getting more fluid with auto-update technology.  
Though Microsoft,
in particular, is held back by business-user requirements, all major  
browsers come
with technology to download and install the latest versions relatively  
easily.
Chrome updates itself automatically without giving users any say in  
the matter,
making its upgrade cycle perhaps the fastest of all.

Until the large number of IE 6 and IE 7 users and conservative  
businesses can be
persuaded to get on the fast-upgrade train, though, programmers will  
have to reckon
with older browsers, too.

But the new-browser generation has one thing going for it: standards.  
HTML, CSS,
SVG, JavaScript, and other technologies remain fluid, but they're in  
the driver's
seat in a way they weren't in the days of Microsoft's unquestioned  
dominance.

More browser variety, along with IE 8's standards-mode default, means  
Web developers
can rely more on standards than on whatever Microsoft chose to do in  
2001. It's a
long way to a faster, richer, more powerful Web, but the path is clear.


Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and  
products, but has a
particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET  
News in 1998
and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers,  
supercomputing, Linux and
open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on  
Twitter at
http://www.twitter.com/stshank.






-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com