23 Musings

Good news in the browser standards war. Thins are really hotting up now as Opera has announced that their latest beta (or maybe even alpha) has passed the Acid3 test.

Let's see the responses from Mozilla and Microsoft as they try to get IE and Firefox up to speed...

Could it be true? Please say it is!

Ars Technica is reporting that intensive browsing in Firefox 3 beta generally consumes less than half the memory that Firefox 2 does. They've also looked against the competitors and found that it uses less memory than IE7 and Opera as well.

Now I'm really excited about the coming release of Firefox 3! The memory leak issues have always been my only issue with the browser, if they fix it Firefox will be as near to perfect as I require for my browsing needs.

I'm still adamant it's Flash that causes the leak though as I never get it unless there is Flash on a page and I leave it in a tab for a while...

Daily Tech has a good article detailing how the current most popular browsers fare with the newly released Acid3 test.

As expected it's way out of their reach. How close the final releases of Firefox 3 and IE8 will come is anyones guess. I reckon they won't pass either as IE8 only passed Acid2 when in private beta.

Yes it's here. The final release of the Acid3 test happened today. Browser manufacturers should be quaking in their boots as it attempts to test their ability to render web standards compliant code. And it's not just CSS being tested, the new Acid3 test puts emphasis on a browsers' DOM scripting abilities as well as continuing to assess it's ability to render CSS, SVG and webfonts.

More in the press release. Can't wait to see how Firefox 3 and IE 8 fare...

The idea is to go here and hope that you see something like the image below (if you're truly standards compliant).

The latest release of Firefox in beta is being targeted with being quicker than Safari in the javascript stakes. It's about time we had a proper bit of competition in the browser wars in areas that really do matter to the users (rather than fancy features and add-ons). Getting performance just right is what will increase the move to one browser from another.

I'm using version 3 and like it but unfortunately they don't seem to be addressing the memory leakage issues which tend to occur with Flash. I'm hoping that's their next step in performance improvement.

I love Firefox, it's my browser of choice and apart from the obvious memory leakages (especially when viewing pages with Flash) it does everything I need.

For those of you who use it but didn't know, there are many ways to tweak and customise it to make it even better. Here's a nice list of some useful tweaks from Computer World.

Mozilla has finally released some details on it's long awaited development to add social networking features into Firefox.

In a nutshell this will enable you to share things with your network of friends and acquaintances. You'll be able to send content to friends and have access to content from friends in your network.

Mozilla say:

Just a few years ago, one of the most popular uses of the internet was to send jokes, cute pictures, and news stories to friends and family (social networks) via email. Fast forward to today, and you’ll find that not a lot has changed except the medium. Now one of the most common uses of instant messenger services and social networking sites is to send people links to jokes, cute pictures and interesting news stories.

This behavior isn’t at all surprising - it’s friends sharing experiences, the very backbone of social interactions and friendships. It’s also unsurprising that most “Web 2.0″ services have a feature that makes it easy for you to build a social network so that you can share things more easily, or subscribe to a friend’s activity as a way of keeping in touch.

What is surprising, however, is how little of this type of functionality has made it into today’s web browsers. The result is that when people think of tools for social interaction, email and instant messenger are at the top of their list, not web browsers.

Enter “The Coop”, a Mozilla Labs project to experiment with adding social tools to the web browser. We want to create a fun and easy way to share links with your friends, and to browse the set of links that friends have shared with you. We also want to make it easy to “subscribe” to a friend in order to make it easy to keep track of the pictures, movies, blog posts and status information that they might be posting on a variety of services.

One thing that springs to mind is that this will surely integrate the experience of visiting some social network sites directly into the browser, thus negating the need to actually visit those websites anymore. I've long thought that some social networks could become obsolete due to users being able to have the same experience on the desktop, this could be the beginning of such a trend, not the best news for advertisers then...

There's more information on the project on the Mozilla wiki here.

Microsoft have released a redesigned homepage on their main corporate website. It is literally just their homepage that's changed, the rest of the site is as it has ever been.

The redesigned homepage looks much better, the layout is much more up to date and they've obviously taken notice of current design, colour and layout trends.

However, this keeping up with the latest trends looks to have been taken a little too far! They've really tried to emulate the Web2.0 crew by stuffing a clunky AJAX navigation module into the page. It's a nice bit of navigation but is incredibly slow to load, in Firefox 2.0 it is so slow and caused the browser to hang while loading meaning you couldn't switch to another tab or use any other browser features. It's slightly better in IE7 but only marginally, the speed is still slower than I'd expect for any piece of website navigation.

The speed of the nav is verging on being so slow it's unusable, it made me want to find another site to find the info I was looking for straight away. Of course, being Microsoft, chances are the info you want may only be on their website so you may have no choice but to persevere...

My opinion? Top marks for trying to bring their homepage up to date, zero for execution.

One of the things that has bothered Firefox's creators has been it's inability to pass the Acid2 browser test. The Acid2 test is a test for the rendering abilities of browsers which was developed by the Web Standards Project. A recent alpha release of Firefox 3.0 has been able to pass thanks to changes in it's rendering engine. Now Firefox can pass it will join the likes of Safari and Opera in being able to say it is truely (or at least as near as possible) standards compliant. And, of course this puts them another step ahead of Microsoft with Internet Explorer.

This alpha release of Firefox 3.0 seems aimed at getting the rendering engine right, which is definately the correct thing to do, they can add all the new features and bells and whistles before a final release.

A couple of weeks ago I posted on the improvements made in IE7 when it was compared to IE6 by the guys at Zimbra when using a Web2.0 app.

Well, they've now revisited the tests and added Firefox 2 into the mix and directly compared it to IE7. The tests were completed using the same interface as before (an app making a lot of use of Javscript and DOM manipulation).

The results seem to confirm what I would have suspected; whilst IE7 has made significant improvements over IE6 it has still not caught up with Firefox in it's performance with handling complex javascript interfaces.

Full details of Zimbra's testing are available here.

The latest release of Firefox should be available tomorrow at the www.getfirefox.com website.

However it is already available at the Mozilla FTP site so if you want a sneak preview go here.

The latest version of Firefox comes hot on the heels of the release of Microsofts latest browser IE7. Firefox 2.0 boasts new features such as an in-line spell checker, anti-phishing tool, better integrated search, support for Javascript 1.7 and further improvements to the way tabbed browsing works.

Excellent piece of insight on the Zimbra blog into how IE7, IE6 and Firefox 1.5 perform when using a Web2.0 app (an app making a lot of use of Javscript and DOM manipulation).

The guys at Zimbra have tested the performance of the three browsers when using the Zimbra Web Client. This is extremely useful for those of us who don't have access to the testing tools needed to perform this kind of task and validates what a lot of web developers will be thinking.

The results show that IE7 is very much improved over it's older counterpart, in their tests Zimbra quote IE7 as about twice as fast as IE6 over a range of tests. Firefox 1.5 of course is about twice as fast as IE7 over the same tests. So while Microsoft has made good progress and plugged a number of memory leaks it seems they still have some way to go!

It will be interesting to see how Firefox 2 compares once that is released!