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Why Browser Innovation Matters

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the building-the-best-ones-out-there dept.

dvanatta was one of a several people who noted a new article by Mitchell Baker on Mozilla.org about why browser innovation matters - especially Gecko, and why it will survive things like Safari Whoops - got the name wrong. Updated.

3 of 528 comments (clear)

  1. Re:survive safari? by quigonn · · Score: 5, Informative

    Safari is _fast_, extremely fast, but you can only see (and feel) it when you're network connection is fast enough, too. ;-) Rendering time is just great. I compared it with some complex websites that our company created, and Safari definitely rendered it all fast enough.

    And it starts up quickly, which is very nice, too. And it has this sexy brushed-metal look that most OSX application created by Apple have. :-) And, what I find really great is that the development of Safari also improved Konqueror's quality in terms of rendering speed and Javascript support.

    --
    A monkey is doing the real work for me.
  2. Re:It's also surviving iTunes... by ianscot · · Score: 5, Informative
    No objection to the other choices you list, but Safari does offer leanness, in both design and responsiveness. That's a change from Mozilla in both respects, as long as the article's about Mozilla. You're right, though -- the "survive" line in the article overblows the thing.

    As usual, Apple releases a beta of an app and people either a) exult or b) express dismay that it didn't utterly change the world. It's a Web browser. By version 1.0 maybe they'll have a nice, stable, lean little browser that hooks into the rest of the OS without becoming cancerware like IE on a Windows box. That'd be handy.

    -- fellow Chimera user.

    --
    "Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
  3. Re:Inovate by packman · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nice flame... *sigh*

    I tried all the guesture plugins mozilla/mozilla based browsers have - but none of these work well.. Actually - the one you pointed out cause my mozilla to show up a completely blank window - nothing on it - guess the XUL interface choked on it... And since I couldn't find how to install such a plugin in an easy way as a normal user - I installed it as root on my gentoo system - bad Idea - it modified the global settings - so for every user - mozilla was suddenly useless... Oh yeah - phoenix choked on it too... Galeon wasn't affected - but the mouse guesture plugin doesn't work for it anyway... had to re-emerge the whole mozilla bloat-thing to get rid of it (in an easy way ;) :p) And when recompiling mozilla - I can't stop wondering what that huge amount of code does - when gecko can be - and is so fast (see galeon) - and mozilla is plain slow.

    I still favor Opera for a lot of other things, like the multi-window interface - not the "fake" and uncomfortable in use "tabbed window" interface... You can't even customize the position of the tabs (top/bottom/left/right), let alone reorganize or drag and drop (only in Opera 7 however - not yet there for linux :( ) - or save window setups...

    Until now - opera seems to me as the most innovative browser around - in every version - new and handy (little) features show up... In mozilla - maybe it's just me - I can't detect such innovations. The only innovation in mozilla is the gecko engine - I consider the bloatware XUL user interface as a (very very very) bad thing (thats why I use galeon from time to time - but it lacks a good user interface).

    If you would ask me - what innovations are you talking about? - well there are some very nice things here:
    - page zooming
    - back-forward using mouse only without even moving the mouse (as already pointed out)
    - Quick menu to enable/disable/control popups, proxy's, java, javascript, plugins, cookies, referrer logging and browser identification
    - inline find
    - hotkeys for everything... keyboard-only browsing is not only perfectly possible - it's even quiet comfortable..
    - crash recovery (no program is perfect - opera also crashes now and then) - continue exactly where you were before...
    - Linked background windows
    - Easy to reach page reload timer
    - Powerfull file transfer manager
    - quick search with any search engine using the adress bar

    For any of these features - you need more than 2 mouseclicks - I didn't had to look into menu's or preferences to find them - they are all right here on my screen, being used - or easy to reach thru right-click-menus... That's what I like about opera - and no other browser even comes near to what opera has to offer on UI level. Open source is nice - I like it - but out there are companies that also have to earn money and deserve it - Opera is one of these where I gladly give money for to have this comfort. Opensource will catch up - but when it does - the opensource community will 'bring/keep their own standards' (on ui-level at least - like it already tried a lot) while other ways can be way more handy - so users that are used to the Opera interface will have difficulties to switch - and rather stay with opera (and maybe pay for it - or look at banners) than to switch to a simular but 'incompatible' user interface, or Opera will maybe have a whole load of new handy small features... Don't be mistaken - a user interface is something very complicated - details are everything - and with opera - almost all the details are there...

    PS: Guys like you piss me off... calling peepz you ignorant clod while it could very well be applied to themselfs... You clearly never used opera - so you don't know what you are talking about... - you should really try it - you could learn something from it - and maybe even bring it to an opensource project...