Will new browsers really upgrade the web?

Mozilla is exhorting users to 'upgrade the Web' with Firefox 3.5, and variations on this 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 applications — everything from today's email to tomorrow's spreadsheets. But it could take a while for reality to catch up with the vision.

It is indeed a bright, shiny future for browsers, and the avant-garde is advancing rapidly. Web developers eager to invigorate their websites 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 not-yet-finalised 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 websites or applications can use, 'web workers' that can perform background processing tasks for web applications, drag-and-drop for better user interfaces, and other technologies.

But that's not all. Also on the frontier are:

  • Faster JavaScript — the language that powers web applications, such as Google Docs — is a public priority for all the top browsers, bar Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and performance has surged in the past 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
  • A variety of other standards — including CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) — stand to improve browsers' graphical sophistication
  • Geo-location technology can, with your permission, allow a website to 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 is 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, which presently lack Flash support. "You can start to get the web page interacting with the video," Firefox director Mike Beltzner said in an interview on Tuesday. For example, one video can be embedded within another and JavaScript can control the video. In one demonstration, face recognition software learned who was in a running video, then identified those individuals later.

A different problem afflicts local storage, which allows browser-based applications to store data…on a person's PC or phone — for example, letting Gmail work without a network connection. The technology is derived from Google's Gears project, which embedded 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 does not guarantee compatibility, because browsers can use different versions, Beltzner observed.

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

The most notable example is Microsoft's IE6, which initially shipped in 2001 and remains in widespread use. Overall, IE has 66 percent market share, according to Net Applications' May 2009 statistics; its share breaks down to 41 percent for IE7, 17 percent for IE6 and seven percent for IE8.

Web programmers have long bemoaned IE6 — there's even a Stop IE6 campaign. More recently, John Martz attracted attention with his cartoon message created for use when IE6 users visit the Momentile's website; it depicts various browsers in the treehouse spurning IE6.

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. However, Flash works the same on different browsers and 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," said Adobe blogger John Dowdell in a 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. Although Microsoft, in particular, is held back by business user requirements, all the main 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.

Clearing the path
But until the large number of IE6 and IE7 users, and conservative businesses, can be persuaded to get on the fast upgrade train, programmers will have to reckon with older browsers, too.

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

More browser variety, along with IE8'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.

Credit: Will new browsers really upgrade the Web? from CNET News.com