JavaScript Performance

Today's presentation of IE9 was refreshing, as Sinofsky noted that IE8's JavaScript performance was clearly slower than that of its competitors. The current build of IE9, however, has already closed this gap significantly and the difference in performance compared to the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox were only minor. As Microsoft notes, given how fast modern JavaScript engines have become over the last year, improvements in the JavaScript engine don't influence real-world performance at this point and other browser sub-systems become the bottlenecks that impede improvements.

Hardware Acceleration and Font Smoothing

Microsoft also plans to make use of DirectX-based hardware accelerated graphics and text in IE9. In his demo, Sinofsky showed that Bing maps can render about 14 frames per second in IE8. With hardware acceleration in IE9 turned on, he got 60 frames per second. In addition, this technology will also increase font quality and readability in IE9.

Videos

Microsoft already published a number of videos with the engineers working on IE9 on Channel 9 (sorry, these are Silverlight only).

Philippe Le Hegaret, the interaction domain leader for the W3C, talked about this issue in an interview with WebMonkey's Michael Calore.

According to Le Hegaret, video support is still one of the main issues surrounding the development of HTML5. Safari and Chrome are both based on the same open-source WebKit engine. Video support, however, is not part of WebKit yet, so every vendor implements it differently. Currently, browser developer disagree over how to implement this feature and what codec to use. Apple wants to use uses H.264 and Mozilla, Google and Opera support Ogg Theora. As of now, HTML5 still includes the <video> tag, but doesn't specify which codec to use.

Transition from Plugins

Until these issues are sorted out, users will have to continue to rely on plugins. Of course, the only way to do away with video plugins would be to make sure that every online video provider also adopted this new standard. As Le Hegaret rightly points out in the interview with WebMonkey, people don't like to install plugins, but everybody installs the Flash plugin because "if you can't see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You're missing a lot." Le Hegaret acknowledges that there has to be a transition period before users can switch from Flash to HTML5 video.

For developers, the fact that the video is not running in a plugin that can't talk to the browser is a major advantage of having built-in video support in the browser. With video in HTML5, developers can connect the video to the rest of the page and have actions on the page or video influence other parts of the site.

What About Microsoft?

At today's PDC keynote, Microsoft noted that it has to improve support for HTML5 in its browser. While the company didn't say a lot about Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft candidly acknowledged that it has to improve JavaScript performance as well. After only a few weeks of development on IE9, the company is already matching the performance of the latest beta versions of Firefox and Chrome.

If you want to learn more about HTML5, also have a look at this story: 5 Exciting Things to Look Forward to in HTML5.

Chrome is deliciously fast compared to other browsers, but the very limited extension support and ecosystem are hard for Firefox-lovers to swallow. Firefox advocates always question Chrome converts about just how fast Chrome will be when it gets weighed down with extensions. It looks like we're about to find out.

We wrote about some of the first unofficial extensions to hit Chrome this Spring and then some code upgrades intended to shore up extension support this Fall. An unofficial directory of Chrome extensions can be found at ChromeExtensions.org. Install them with caution, it's not yet as simple as managing Firefox extensions is.

What's your #1 request for a Chrome extension? I want Firefox Drag and Drop Zones or the GCal pop-up plug-in for Chrome. Greasemonkey would be nice too, though user scripts can be added manually to Chrome already.

And I want it to sing with speed, just like Chrome does today!

It's an awfully charming video by one of the greatest musicians of all time. This 63-year old mega-millionaire is downright folksy when talking about web browsers.

Hey Dolly, if you like IE8 - you should let Google's Chrome sweep you off your feet! Not a lot of features, but it's super fast for a fast-thinking woman like you. Is it customization you're looking for? We know you've seen a whole lot of things all around the world - but have you seen Firefox yet?

Dolly Parton? How are you going to top that, Mozilla?

Thanks to James Governor for finding the above video.

As of now, the Jetpack library only features a small number of extensions. Users can browse Jetpacks by tag, author and popularity (though the most popular Jetpack (a Google Wave add-on) currently only has 24 downloads. Nonetheless, quite a few interesting Jetpack add-ons have already found their way into the gallery. These include a tool that translates text with Google Translate, a browser-based image editor from pixlr that can be invoked from the right-click menu in Firefox and a plugin that displays tabs with thumbnails in the left sidebar.

Give it a Try

To get started with Jetpack, you have to install the Jetpack plugin first. After that, just head over to the Jetpack Gallery and install a few of the plugins. To manage the installed Jetpacks, point your browser to about:jetpack.

According to Google's blog post about the beta release, the sync feature has to first be activated on each of your computers where Google Chrome is used. To do this, you'll need to download the beta build of the browser available here. Once installed, click the "wrench" menu (yes, the one with the wrench icon) in Google Chrome and select "Synchronize my bookmarks" from the menu that appears. Sign into your Google account in the dialog box that pops up. If you've already set up Sync on another computer, you'll then be prompted to confirm that your different sets of bookmarks should be merged together. In that case, click "Merge and Sync" to complete the process. Finally, click "OK" when you've finished.

Not only does this feature sync your bookmarks, it also creates a copy of your bookmarks file on Google Docs in a new folder called "Google Chrome." (Wonder what else will go in that folder in the future?)

What's in Store for Sync

For now, the Sync feature is only synchronizing browser bookmarks, but the framework behind Sync is ultimately designed to handle the synchronization of other kinds of browser data as well. As to what sort of data that could be, Google can't provide any official confirmation just yet. However, they did say that you could imagine that "this type of infrastructure could be extended to other types of user data such as passwords" in the future. We'll speculate that it will eventually include those passwords, your browser history, and whatever favorite websites appear as thumbnails on the New Tab page. After all, if Mozilla's Weave Sync prototype can handle those sorts of tasks already, there's no reason to believe that Google couldn't do the same.

Because the new Sync feature uses an XMPP connection to synchronize the changes, changes made on one computer are synchronized immediately to another. Not just quickly, mind you, but immediately. This is possible because XMPP is what's known as a "real-time" communication protocol - the same one that powers Google Talk, the company's IM service.

The use of this sort of technology hints at how Google plans to make their Chrome web browser the core of their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. The new OS will run web applications "in the cloud," a radical change from current OS offerings where many applications are still installed on the computer's hard drive itself. With Chrome (the browser's) ability to synchronize data in real-time between computers, it's easy to see how a cloud OS could operate. It wouldn't matter which machine you used, your data would be available, stored in the cloud, synchronized, and all accessible upon login to your Google account. That prospect is either amazing or terrifying depending on your trust level when it comes to Google. Perhaps it's even both. 

Chrome Gets Faster, Too

While Bookmark Sync is the most interesting feature to debut in the new beta, there are some notable speed improvements to mention, too. The latest build improves performance by 30% since the current stable release of Chrome and by 400% since the very first stable release, as measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests. 

As noted earlier, speed was a major factor in Firefox's 3.6 beta 1, released just this Friday. Both companies are going head-to-head when it comes to browser speed, JavaScript performance and startup times, but no official speed tests have been done yet to compare the two new beta releases.

To download the latest build of Google Chrome beta, head over to the Chrome beta site here. The official beta requires Windows XP SP2 or higher.

In the latest edition of the Firefox browser, the team has introduced the following new features:

• Built-in support for Personas, Firefox's themeing system which lets you browse through a gallery of skins and apply different ones with just a click
• Plugin alerts: Firefox will now alert users if their plugins are out-of-date, a useful addition since older plugins can lead to performance problems and even security issues.
• Open native videos can now be viewed full-screen
• Drag-and-drop features: In the beta, you can drag and drop files from your computer into the browser allowing you to easily upload files from your PC to web sites. 
• Support for the WOFF font format
• Support for CSS, DOM, HTML5, and other developer features
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time

Why Speed Matters

Although Firefox and its rival web browsers are all fighting to best Internet Explorer in terms of install base, they still pit themselves against each other with their unique features, being first to offer support for new standards, and of course, web browser performance.

It's in this last area that Firefox has struggled recently. Past builds showed Firefox beaten by the up-and-comer Google Chrome in boot-up, page-loading, and JavaScript performance. Despite Chrome's low market share of only around 4%, no company can safely ignore the competition when that competition is Google (just look at what Google did to the GPS market last week!).

Chrome may be a relatively unknown browser among mainstream users for now, but if Google holds true to their promises to launch their netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS, which uses the Chrome browser to run applications, there could be a whole new user base of Walmart shoppers who rapidly make a browser switch without even realizing it. And with Chrome's primary focus on browser speed, designed from the ground-up with the idea of running intensive web applications, Mozilla knows that one day Chrome could end up being serious competition...at least once the large majority of computing moves to the cloud. In fact, that day may have already arrived for some of today's web users.

To improve browser performance, Mozilla introduced a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.5. Many of the speed increases in 3.6 can now be attributed to this technology. However, TraceMonkey has to go up against Chrome's own system, V8, which Google optimized earlier this year to give their browser a 30% speed bump.

Of course, we'll need to see some formal tests completed before determining where the browsers stand today, but it's likely going to be a situation where the engines are neck-and-neck in terms of performance. While this aspect to the browser war may go unnoticed by most web surfers, it's the sort of situation where everyone wins. And the prize will be a faster web surfing experience, no matter which browser you choose to use.

Today, Flock is trying a new strategy. The company plans to extend itself beyond the "social" niche by trying to find a home in an entirely different one: the Hispanic web. To tap into this new audience, Flock is releasing a Spanish-language web browser in partnership with Univision Interactive Media, the top Spanish-language media company in the U.S.

According to Flock's VP of Business Development and Marketing, Dan Burkhart, there are now more than 22 million Hispanics online and the market's growth will continue to outpace that of the English-speaking web for the foreseeable future. Although social networking sites have released Spanish-language versions - for example, latino.myspace.com - he notes that there are "few if any social enabling applications that have made the investment to serve this important market." The Hispanic audience also actively engages in social networking activities. More than 40% visit sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter on a daily basis. Thanks to Flock's built-in social networking features, says Burkhart, that audience can now stay connected to those sites and to popular content from Univision.com.

In order to promote the product to the Hispanic web audience, the homepage of Univision.com will feature a large display ad touting the browser. In addition, there will be other display ads across the Univision network as well as pre-roll trailers inserted into video content. Next year, the company will pursue other offline channels to promote the Spanish version of Flock, too.

As with the specialized versions of Flock that have been released in the past, such as the green "Eco Edition" and the fashionable "Gloss Edition," this new Univision-branded version will offer favorite bookmarks, RSS feeds, media streams of popular Univision links, videos, and photos and persistent links to other areas of Univision.com. It will also come with a default homepage tab that takes you right to the Univision homepage.

However, the company is quick to point out that this new version is different from the Eco and Gloss editions of the browser, both of which are no longer supported. While those versions were clever marketing gimmicks at the time - the Eco edition was released on Earth Day, for instance - neither were able to attract a wide audience. That's because they didn't have sizeable distribution partners, says Burkhart. "By partnering with Univision, who has been the most visited Spanish language website for many years running, we have a dedicated partner who is committed to ensuring that the Univision Edition of Flock is distributed aggressively."

Will the Hispanic Web Market Help Flock Succeed?

It will be interesting to see how Flock does among the Spanish-speaking audience, especially because the browser itself is still the same under the hood. Although it will feature Univision content, Spanish-language menus and soon, a full Spanish-language installer, it's not a new product. It's still the same Flock. And that was the problem that most people had with it in the first place.

Earlier this year, when we asked the question: "why don't you love Flock?" we received over 100 comments in response. For many people the browser's interface was too busy and cluttered, making them feel overloaded with information. Others claimed that Flock was a resource hog and prone to bugs and crashes. And still others preferred Webkit-built browsers like Safari and Chrome, both of which are known for their speed.

The question now is whether or not these same complaints will put off the Hispanic audience, too, or if they will overlook these issues because the browser so uniquely caters to their needs. Only time will tell how well Univision's marketing push succeeds, but ultimately, if Flock can't address its shortcomings in some way, it won't work for any audience, no matter what language they speak.

The Spanish version of Flock is available for download now at flock.univision.com.

In the mobile market, Fennec goes up against Opera Mobile and Skyfire, which are available on a wide variety of platforms. The most important competitor, however, is probably Safari, though Apple only makes its browser available on its own phones. Safari may not be available on a large number of different phones, but it has set the bar pretty high when it comes to the user experience that users now expect from a mobile browser. With the Awesome bar and Weave bookmark synchronization, Firefox, however, will offer a number of features that Safari doesn't currently offer. Fennec will also offer support for plugins.

Om Malik looked at an early version of Fennec on the Nokia N900 and thinks that the browser "is perhaps its single biggest standout feature" on the device.

Mozilla on the iPhone

Earlier last week, a number of rumors about a Mozilla app for the iPhone also started to make the rounds, though it remains unclear what this app would look like. Apple, after all, isn't likely to allow a full Firefox-based browser on the iPhone.

Despite its ho-hum reception, the company is moving forward with its plans to make Unite a full-fledged feature of the Opera browser. Today, the Opera Unite beta is launching and will be made available in Opera 10.10. Given the recent cloud outages, one has to wonder if Unite will be given a second look by the crowd of naysayers who so recently belittled it.

Not much about Unite has changed since its initial launch except that it initially spent several months as a standalone product before being integrated into the Opera web browser. Now, with the release of Opera 10.10, it's clear that the company intends for Unite to be one of the browser's core features.

Included in Unite are six applications which are the photo app, the file sharing app, messenger, the above mentioned media player, a "fridge" app that lets you post notes on your friends' virtual refrigerators and a web server that lets you host web sites directly from your computer.

Cloud Outages Leave Users Wary; Unite Gets a Second Look?

Although the technology itself remains, for the most part, the same, what may have changed in the time that passed since Unite's June reveal is the sentiment among Unite's potential users. Since the original launch, there have been numerous cloud computing outages which included yet another long-lasting Gmail outage, a DDOS attack that took down social services like Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal simultaneously, a Facebook database maintenance issue which locked 150,000 users out of their accounts for a week, multiple Twitter outages (although these are nothing new) and, of course, the granddaddy of them all: a cloud computing disaster at Danger that erased all personal data from the hansdets of thousands of T-Mobile Sidekick users.

All these above incidents occurred in the span of only a few months, too, leaving people to question the stability of the cloud. Perhaps the cloud, often thought of as much safer and more stable than our own personal hard drives, isn't all that it's cracked up to be after all? Instead of just uploading everything to the web and then assuming that it will be there forever, the rash of outages have many tech geeks returning to the old-fashioned computer backup in addition to hosting content out on the web.

This hybrid approach to cloud computing (local + cloud) could mean that some of Unite's former naysayers will give it a second look. Since it's designed for sharing locally stored files on the web using Opera's servers as a proxy, it taps into that whole "forgo the cloud" mentality. While Opera's man-in-the-middle server infrastructure may crash one day (and it's already had its struggles), your data would still be accessible assuming your computer itself doesn't die. To some, that may seem like a safer approach than a 100% reliance on cloud providers.

Others Say: Don't Blame the Cloud, It's Still the Future

However, not everyone thinks that outages, even those as severe as the Danger disaster, spell failure for the cloud computing model - they're only growing pains. Sure, "cloud computing isn't perfect," writes PC Mag's Lance Ulanoff, but Danger's failure is "a failure of, more than likely, a few over-worked IT guys who incorrectly set up data redundancy." Ulanoff contends, and many others will certainly agree, that despite failures such as this, the cloud overall remains safer and more trustworthy than anyone's own home or office computers.

Still, the outages may have some worried. Those who are worried enough to begin storing data back on their own computers, using the cloud only as backup and no longer as primary storage, may now be interested in trying out Opera Unite. That may give Unite a little boost for the time being. But ultimately, the technology that was supposed to change the web seems like backward progress. Cloud computing may have its ups and downs, but it's the future of computing, not Unite's peer-to-peer.

As Google's Mike Smith and Alex Russell told us when we talked to them about this project, a lot of companies have good reasons why they can't just simply switch away from Internet Explorer. After all, these enterprises often have made large investments in an infrastructure that is only compatible with IE. As Google pointed out to us, though, this shouldn't hold back developers who want to explore the possibilities that newer, faster and more modern browsers like Chrome can offer.

Google, which has lately developed a tendency to route around other vendors, developed this plugin without help from Microsoft, but Smith and Russell noted that Microsoft gives developers a lot of ways to easily extend Internet Explorer.

Focus on Developers

Thanks to this plugin, developers will now be able to give these users an option to at least switch to a faster rendering engine by just adding one single line of code to their sites ().

Indeed, this current release is mostly meant to give developers a choice for how they want to deliver their web apps to their users. At least for now, users won't be able to make the switch to the Chrome engine persistent, though they can invoke the plugin by putting 'cf:' in front of any URL.

Google is obviously interested in getting its web apps into businesses. These web apps tend to work best in a modern browser with a fast JavaScript engine and that is not something Internet Explorer is known for. As Mike Smith told us, the Web shouldn't be hobbled by this.

As for the user experience, the Google team tells us that the switch will be absolutely seamless and that the plugin will offer the same speed and reliability of Chrome inside IE.

A Trojan Horse?

Google hopes that this plugin will enable developers in enterprises to write code for a modern browser that isn't held back by some of the old paradigms. That, of course, is a noble undertaking. At the same time, though, we can't help but wonder if Google also plans to use this plugin to plant a Trojan horse inside these companies. After all, very few businesses are ready to make the switch from IE to Chrome right now, but Chrome Frame now offers companies the option to get the best of both worlds and - maybe - switch over to Chrome completely in the long run.

As for Google itself, the company plans to use Chrome Frame to make Google Wave run smoothly in Internet Explorer but hasn't announced any other plans to use Chrome Frame in other products yet.

Unfortunately, there seemed to be a problem with the new security feature: it wasn't working...or at least, so it seemed. As it turns out, the problem was that users weren't informed as to how to properly activate the anti-phishing protection, an issue that points to a poor implementation of what could and should have been a major breakthrough in mobile computing technology.

Although Apple touted the anti-phishing protection back in March when they announced their 3.0 update, the new feature didn't actually materialize until this month when the company released the OS 3.1 iPhone/iPod Touch software. According to Apple, the anti-phishing protection feature will display an on-screen warning message when you attempt to visit a known malicious website.

Once the update was released, security researchers and other Apple enthusiasts began testing the new technology. The results were immediately disappointing. "I've not been able to get it to block anything," Michael Sutton, vice president of research at security firm Zscaler was quoted as saying. He had been testing the feature using known phishing websites identified by the anti-phishing database hosted at PhishTank. The Mac Security Blog also found after extensive testing that it simply "does not seem to work." MacWorld, however, found that the feature worked sometimes, but the inconsistency hinted that the technology was not "ready for public consumption," they reported.

What gives? Did Apple really release a broken feature? Were they even aware of the problem? Blogger Jim Dalrymple of The Loop decided to go straight to the source: he asked Apple.

Apple Says "You're Doing it Wrong"

Apparently, this was not a case of the anti-phishing technology being broken. It was a case of everyone simply "doing it wrong." As it turns out, in order for Safari's anti-phishing database to update, there are a few particular steps that need to be followed, explained an Apple spokesperson. After updating the phone to the OS 3.1 update, users need to do the following:

1. Launch the Safari web browser.
2. Connect to a Wi-Fi network.
3. Charge the iPhone with the screen off.

The spokesperson added that for "most users" this process should happen automatically when they charge their phone. We would have to disagree. "Most users" don't launch the Safari browser prior to charging their device - if anything, they close down any open applications before plugging in the phone to charge.

Poorly Implemented, Poorly Explained

If you follow the above steps, the feature will work. However, most users will never know to do this unless they happen to closely follow technology news and blogs. The general mainstream population - the very demographic Apple so craftily attracts via their billion dollar marketing campaigns - expects things to "just work." That is the Apple promise, after all.

Yet even on Apple's own website where they detail the various new features in the OS 3.1 update, there is no mention as to how the anti-phishing protection should be utilized. It simply lists that the feature exists. A helpful link to a "how to" guide would seem appropriate here or, at the very least, a footnote.

Having to perform the somewhat unintuitive steps to get the anti-phishing protection feature to function properly seems like an unusual miss for a company who generally makes things simple and straightforward. Why does it need Wi-Fi, for example? Apple claims that the Wi-Fi connectivity is required so as not to incur any additional data fees for the end user. But launching the browser? We almost wonder if it wouldn't have made better sense for Apple to implement the feature in the new iTunes update instead. The desktop software could retrieve the updated anti-phishing database from the internet upon launch and could then sync it to the iPhone or iPod Touch the next time it was plugged in. That would also alleviate another common problem with the current implementation - if the phone isn't plugged in long enough, the update won't complete and users will only be partially protected. On the other hand, the inclusion of the database via a sync would have ensured that all the data was copied over to the phone.

In the end, though, Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, reminds us that maybe we shouldn't be too hard on Apple. "Many other smartphones don't offer even the most elementary form of anti-phishing protection to their users," he says. That may be true but, unfortunately, the way Apple chose to deliver their anti-phishing protection feature means that most iPhone users won't be protected either.

While we wondered if Google was getting ready to make extensions a part of the stable series soon, it now turns out that this feature won't arrive in the stable version of Chrome until version 4.0. If you feel adventurous, you could always switch to the dev channel.

In addition, Google has also added some new features for extension developers, including the ability to "load an extension and pack an extension" more conveniently.

A small ecosystem of Chrome extensions is already growing up around Chrome, even though only a small number of Chrome users are currently able to use them. Once Google enables these extensions for all users, they will be able to use a wide range of them. The absence of extensions has held back a lot of users who may want to use Chrome but rely on certain extensions. Now, however, it looks like it's only a matter of time before all Google Chrome users will be able to tap into this growing extension ecosystem.

Given how stable both the beta and developer channel versions of Chrome on Windows are at this point, we hope that Google will soon upgrade the stable version to the 3.x or 4.x series, as they offer a lot more functionality. The Mac and Linux versions are currently still somewhat unstable, but at least the Mac version has now become quite usable.

Looking at StatCounter's browser data, it doesn't look like this release had real any influence on Opera's global market share yet, but in Europe, Opera went from around 6.5% on September 1st to 7.5% today, and in the US, Opera went from 0.65% to 8%. In September 2008, Opera was hovering around 0.5% in the US, so the company has definitely seen some nice growth over the last year, even though in September 2008, it was also immediately overtaken by the newly released first beta of Google Chrome.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share