Mozilla just announced the launch of Kraken, a new JavaScript benchmark. The Mozilla team notes that developers spend a lot of time optimizing their code to improve the browser's performance on certain benchmarks, but these improvement often don't actually create a better user experience. According to Mozilla engineer Rob Sayre, Kraken instead focuses on recreating "realistic workloads and forward-looking applications."
Across the board, all major browser developers are currently working very hard to speed up their software's performance. While a lot of the focus has currently shifted to hardware acceleration, there are still some speed gains to be made by optimizing most browsers' JavaScript engines. Earlier this year, the Mozilla JavaScript team launched the Jaegermonkey project in order to speed up the JavaScript performance of Firefox, and today, the team launched the first preview version of Firefox 4 with JaegerMonkey.
Mozilla announced Mozilla Labs Gaming today, a push to get developers to make use of new Open Web technologies to build "awesome games" that can be played in a Web browser.
The move was timed to coincide with the latest update to Firefox 4, now in beta development, which promises better graphics and a new application programming interface (API) that will let developers read and write raw audio data in the browser. Together, the two announcements are aimed to let users and developers know there are still reasons to be pumped about the Web in this age of native apps.
Microsoft plans to unveil the design of Internet Explorer 9 next week, but thanks to a new leak, we now have a pretty good idea of what the next generation of Microsoft's browser will look like. Currently, Microsoft only offers "developer preview" versions of the browser that do not feature the new user interface. The enterprising Internet Explorer 9 fans at IEBest.com, however, managed to get an early copy of the browser and captured the new interface on video.
Google is celebrating the second anniversary of its Google Chrome browser with the release of new stable and beta versions that have a cleaner and simpler user interface and increased speed and performance.
As the Google Chrome Blog points out, Chrome 6 is years beyond where most imagined browser technology would be when Chrome was first introduced just two years ago.
These days, even Microsoft is awaiting the demise of its nearly decade-old Internet Explorer 6. Today, the company looked at August's browser usage numbers according to Net Applications and announced that "Internet Explorer 6 is at or below 5% in many developed markets", calling the drop "overall goodness".
At the same time, the company is celebrating its continued dominance in the browser market, calling IE8 "the fastest growing browser worldwide."
Steve Jobs doesn't like Flash. He says it has poor security, kills your battery and performs poorly on mobile devices. For those reasons and more, Apple doesn't allow Flash applications or video to run on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
Today, Skyfire will try to break through Apple's Flash blockade with the submission of its mobile browser, which transcodes Flash into HTML5 in real time, to the App Store. And according to its creators, Apple is going to accept it.
SublimeVideo, an HTML5-based video player from Switzerland-based development and design firm Jilion, has launched SublimeVideo.net, an HTML5 Video-Player-as-a-Service. The goal of the new site is to provide tools for Web publishers that will allow for the easy deployment of zero-maintenance HTML5 video on a website in a matter of seconds, and without the need to understand the complexities of the different Web browser versions and their various specifications.
Google just confirmed that Chrome will soon support GPU hardware acceleration. Developers can speed up the rendering of complex pages by offloading a lot of the processing to a computer's graphics card, which - after all - was specifically designed for these tasks. As browser developers continue to try to increase the responsiveness of their applications, hardware acceleration is the natural next place to look for performance gains. Microsoft is also working on hardware acceleration for the next version of its browser. The company plans to unveil the first complete build of Internet Explorer 9 next month. Mozilla, too, offers support for GPU acceleration in the latest beta version of Firefox 4 for Windows.
Even though mobile devices are getting increasingly powerful, most mobile browsers are still limited versions of their more fully featured desktop counterparts. With today's release of the latest alpha version of Fennec for Android (2.0 or higher) and Nokia N900, Mozilla is aiming to change this. Specifically, Mozilla hails Fennec as the "world's first mobile Web browser to support add-ons."
