Ilya Kozhevnikov

Browser Newsletter #16

March 15, 2008

First look: Internet Explorer 8 beta

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 1 for developers, released by Microsoft on March 6, offers some fascinating new capabilities. For example, it introduces two new features called Activities and WebSlices that extend the capabilities of the browser by interacting with other Web sites and services.

There are also a variety of other changes, including some much-needed additions, such as a feature that will restore crashed browser sessions and tabs. I’ll highlight what features are new and discuss how they may work when IE8 is finally released.

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© Comptuterworld, 07/03/08

Using The Emulate IE7 Button

When you’re working on your pages, the combination of the Emulate IE7 button and the Developer Toolbar opens up a few more options for you.

Default: Internet Explorer reports the IE8 user agent string and use the IE8 layout modes

Emulate IE7 pressed: Internet Explorer reports the IE7 user agent string and uses the IE7 layout modes

SXSW: Browser Wars Become Browser Peace? Not Quite

Last year’s Browser Wars panel wasn’t very well attended, considering the subject matter (maybe it was the 10 am start time). But the powers that be have moved the panel to the afternoon, kept the same cast of characters, and this year’s Part II of the panel has a capacity crowd. And, as it was last year, it’s the best SXSW panel I’ve seen this year.

The panel is moderated by system architect Arun Ranganathan (formerly of AOL), and the panelists are: Chris Wilson, Microsoft Platform Architect (worked on every version of IE that you’ve used), Brendan Eich, Firefox CTO (and inventor of JavaScript), Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Chief of Standards

Safari Leads Browsers According to Acid3 Testers

When the Acid3 test came out, most expected it to deal a serious blow to modern browsers, with its array of advanced graphics and compatibility tests. With a focus on rendering graphics embedded in HTML code, CSS3 compliance, DOM compliance, CSS2 downloadable fonts, as well as handling new graphics formats and Unicode support, Acid3 challenged modern browsers with the web’s bleeding edge technology.

It turned out they were even more woefully unprepared then expected for the task. Now one blog site, Anomalous Anomaly, is taking up the challenge of scoring and compiling scores for all widely available browsers. The list, which can be viewed here, paints an interesting picture of web compliance.

iPhone rules pose Net neutrality, antitrust concerns

Apple’s recent announcement of the iPhone application software development kit is drawing criticism from Net neutrality activists. While the company has previously angered many for its practice of bricking unlocked phones, it is now being accused of anticompetitive behavior.

Both the Firefox and Opera Web browsers, which compete with Apple’s pre-installed Safari browser, are forbidden as they support hundreds of user-created add-ons. Furthermore, the Web browsers support Javascript, which is a key component of most Web 2.0 content. Javascript is an interpreted programming language, and thus forbidden as per Apple’s terms of service.

Also banned from the iPhone: programming languages Ruby, Python, Perl, and Java. Quake, the video game engine ported to practically every platform (including Google’s Android), as well as Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and .NET are also persona non grata.

Sun announced last week that it is readying a version of Java for the iPhone. Once the restrictive iPhone license was pointed out, Eric Klein, the vice president of Java marketing at Sun, backpedaled somewhat on his own personal blog, writing that “I’ll leave those (legal) questions to another forum, but we really do want to deliver a JVM if at all possible.” This alone should make for an interesting fight, as Sun is no stranger to filing antitrust complaints.

First look: Firefox 3 beta 4 brings new Vista hotness

Mozilla announced today the official release of Firefox 3 beta 4, which includes over 900 additional improvements related to the previous beta release. At this stage in development, most of the work on Firefox is heavily focused on polishing the user interface, refining performance, and reducing the memory overhead. These efforts clearly show in beta 4, which is highly robust and impressively responsive.

Firefox 3 beta 4 now available for download

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is now available for download. This is the twelfth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.

IE8 speeds things up

IE8 Beta 1 has several performance improvements listed in the release notes. Many of these improvements center around the DOM and JavaScript execution. And their announcement about stricter standards compliance is a great move forward. There are three changes that are big and relate to my performance best practices: 6 downloads per hostname, loading scripts in parallel (the biggest improvement!), and support for data: URIs.

Address Bar Improvements in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

Internet Explorer 8 will automatically highlight what it considers to be the owning domain of whatever site you’re currently viewing.

Support For Pasting Multi-Line URLs

Improved Click Behavior

Inline Autocomplete: cut for IE8

Hands on: Mozilla’s new Prism brings web sites to the desktop

Prism makes it possible to launch web sites from the desktop and load them into a simple browser window without all of the extra features and functionality of a regular browser. This is advantageous for users because it allows them to run those sites in a separate process from their regular Firefox browser and interact with the content without any unnecessary distractions. Prism also allows web application content to be customized in some ways to make it more conducive to desktop use.

Firefox 3 beta 4: postMessage and perf

Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.

Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.

about:mozilla - Beta 4, Beta 5, Free t-shirts, Dehydra, Seneca College, Prism, and more

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is now available for download. Please note that we do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download this beta release, as it is intended for testing purposes only. As always, ongoing planning and progress on Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso. For more information about the new features and changes that need testing in this beta, please see the DevNews blog post.

At last week’s meeting, the Firefox development team decided that a fifth beta would be required for Firefox 3 based on the number of blocker bugs remaining. This additional beta will ensure that changes that may affect website compatibility or user experience will be exposed to a wider audience for feedback and testing. The string freeze deadline for Beta 5 has already passed, and code freeze is currently scheduled for March 18th. For more information about the beta and its schedule, see the DevNews blog post.

Microsoft updates Internet Explorer

Microsoft continues beating the drum for its shift to online services, providing a detailed look at forthcoming versions of two of its most important Web-related products.

Last week, Ray Ozzie, the company’s rarely seen chief software architect, expanded on the message he’s delivered since arriving nearly three years ago: The Internet is the center of our digital lives. More software functions will be accessed as online services via a range of devices. Advertising is the economic engine of this big structural change in the industry.

In a company-wide effort to grab more of that ad revenue, Microsoft has been on a building and buying spree — including its effort to acquire Yahoo, about which Ozzie said little.

Executives here instead outlined new features in an early test version of Internet Explorer 8 — a key piece because the Web browser is the gateway to the Internet.

E8’s new features will include WebSlices, which allows users to keep an eye on information from a specific page, such as an eBay auction or a stock ticker, without constantly returning to its source. Another is Activities, which allows users to select text on a Web page and a right-click of the mouse will bring up a menu of options, including sending the text to a blog, looking up words or mapping addresses.

Another major change in IE8 is support for standards that make Internet sites appear and behave the same way, regardless of the browser.

Besides working on IE8, Microsoft in the past year has charged into the market for distributing online video and animation with Silverlight, a competitor to Adobe’s dominant Flash. The free download, which plugs into any browser, was released in September and is being downloaded more than 1.5 million times a day.

IE8 and Loosely-Coupled IE (LCIE)

Essentially, LCIE is a collection of internal architecture changes to Internet Explorer that improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of the browser. It also paves the way for future improvements in other areas, including security and usability. To do this, we’ve isolated the browser frame and its tabs and changed them to use asynchronous communication between components. In this post, I’ll walk you through the changes we’ve done in IE8 Beta 1.

Mozilla Labs Updates Prism Prototype

Mozilla Labs has released an updated prototype of its forthcoming Web-to-desktop application technology called Prism.

Prism aims to provide a way for online applications to work outside of the normal browser window, using a subset of browser infrastructure. Eventually, it will be extended to include offline functionality, along with Mozilla’s Firefox.

Firefox 3 Memory Usage

As the web and web browsers have matured, people have started expecting different things out of them. When we first released Firefox, few people were browsing with tabs or add-ons. I’ve written before about how web usage patterns have changed, so too have our strategies on how to effectively make use of system resources such as memory.

We’ve made more significant changes to the platform than I can count, including many to reduce our memory footprint. The result has been dramatic, and you can see for yourself by getting a copy of the recently released Firefox 3 Beta 4.

Prism for Firefox: desktop web apps just got easier

Mozilla Labs has released a new version of Prism, a Firefox-based application that aims to make web applications fit better in today’s computer desktops. Prism runs one web application on a single window providing some features only possible for desktop programs in the past.

Firefox 3: how to rock on a memory budget

Defragmentation, which has reduced memory usage after startup in more than one third.

Image cache, fonts cache, back/forward cache, and more. They have all been tuned up to free used resources after certain time of inactivity.

Uncompressed images are discarded from memory after a while if not active.

More efficient animated GIFs storage in memory.

About 400 memory leaks have been hunted and taken down thanks in part to better tools to identify them.

A cycle collector takes care of objects referencing each other preventing either of them being cleared from memory.

The IE8 Favorites Bar

The Favorites bar, previously known as the Links toolbar, has been updated with great new functionality that helps you get information from your favorite websites quickly and easily. The new IE8 Favorites bar still has your favorite links just one click away, but also allows you to add WebSlices (new feature debuting in IE8) and feeds to the Favorites bar, facilitating your navigation experience. The WebSlices and feeds on the Favorites bar will check for updates to content on your favorite websites without requiring navigation to those websites.

Browser Newsletter #16

First look: Internet Explorer 8 beta

Using The Emulate IE7 Button

SXSW: Browser Wars Become Browser Peace? Not Quite

Safari Leads Browsers According to Acid3 Testers

iPhone rules pose Net neutrality, antitrust concerns

First look: Firefox 3 beta 4 brings new Vista hotness

Firefox 3 beta 4 now available for download

IE8 speeds things up

Address Bar Improvements in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

Hands on: Mozilla’s new Prism brings web sites to the desktop

Firefox 3 beta 4: postMessage and perf

about:mozilla - Beta 4, Beta 5, Free t-shirts, Dehydra, Seneca College, Prism, and more

Microsoft updates Internet Explorer

IE8 and Loosely-Coupled IE (LCIE)

Mozilla Labs Updates Prism Prototype

Firefox 3 Memory Usage

Prism for Firefox: desktop web apps just got easier

Firefox 3: how to rock on a memory budget

The IE8 Favorites Bar

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