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Why Browser Innovation Matters
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.
As an occasional website designer, I would like to avoid having to delve into the DOM to maintain a consistent appearance and functionality across platforms/browsers.
Browsers are mature. IE, Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror, Opera, etc. are all mature pieces of software now.
What "innovations" can you put in mature software, other than small details?
If big innovations are possible in mature software, then people wouldn't stick to MS all the time. Remember that a lot of MS software won because they were "good enough", not because they were "the best".
Sure, mouse gestures are nice when they work as intended.
But what about an inline spell-checker?
We just had an article on tabbed browsing, and why its super-important.
And why exactly is it self^M^M^M^Msuper-important? Why is it important to have a 20MB compressed piece of software that can barely render a page w/o crashing? Browser technology was dead in like '96 - like yeah, we could write yet another browser, but why not do something else with free time?
Rant said, stuff like gestures will become useful once the technology matures. It's just that there's so little stuff like that and more matter-of-preference stuff like tabbed browsing. The way XP groups multiple app windows on the task bar is another way of accomplishing pretty much the same thing, done at the OS/wm level.
Must-not-watch TV!
The comparison here isn't really between two opposites - business plans are driven by the goal of satisfying customer demand, which is the best measure whether something "benefits human beings". All too often techies get wrapped up in what they think is a great innovation, but in reality the broader user base doesn't really care (see the dot-com bust)...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
...Because everytime it occurs, geeks everywhere complain about the new way, and how good it was in the ol' days.
(Remember Arpanet and Gopher? I remember when we used to complain about the world wide web, and how it was going to ruin the internet.)
Flash popups anyone? That's innovation for ya.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I hardly think there's any argument on this point is there? At least not among /.ers. It's not just a hatred of MSFT that keeps me using mozilla and phoenix daily builds. I refuse to use Netscape browsers for the same reasons: I will not allow ANY monster company (e.g. MSFT, IBM, AOL/TW, CNN, Apple) to dictate or control my web experience. Period.
.nosig
the fact is, every time i turn on a regular L-user to Mozilla as an alternative to IE, they make the switch and never go back. they love the pop-up blocking, and the control they have been given back. lets face it IE allows those drive-bye shooting like viruses (spyware) to be presented for install so fast, it is the worst security risk out there today, and the biggest dump on useability (cuz spyware is obnoxious as hell) in the entire os.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
There are two great opensource browser backends out there: Konqueror and Gecko. We know that they will attempt to stay compatible with eachother and currently Konq is a bit faster. I say, let each have their own.
The killer app for the web browser is browsing.
Is it? I mean, probably a lot of us do online banking. That's not just browsing anymore, is it? Posting to slashdot is not 'just browsing' as well.
The point is, the browser is an UI for a lot of things these days. Web banks, forums, groupware or whathaveyou use the browser. Why is improvements etc. a bad thing for these?
And (unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view) these web applications will get bigger and have a lot more functionality. Maybe this is not a good thing, but anyway the browser is a key point in these things.
I don't think this is just egomania on the browser peoples side, but the web browser, as simple as it seems to be, is an important app these days. Why people shell out to buy Opera, if it's 'just browsing'?
I'll tell you one thing, the world doesn't deserve a browser as good as Opera. I had the pleasure of using a computer that had Windows installed the other day, and the new Opera 7 is simply amazing. Not only can you do anything by using exclusively the mouse (or the keyboard), but the small screen rendering works perfectly. And I thought that was just going to be a crap marketing feature that mutilated the page. It's got integrated e-mail with spam filtering and PIM features, button themes for skins, and renders stuff that Internet Explorer chokes on. And that was just what I found in one night. I know I sound like a corporate shill, but it's not advertising if they didn't pay you for it. This is one thing I would GLADLY pay for if it came out on Linux (and think it was a small price to pay, too). If I browsed the web a lot, I think I might consider booting into windows just to browse, for this reason.
I've recently dropped Moz in favour of Opera for a number of reasons.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If browsers like Opera and IE and Safari don't innovate, Mozilla wont have anything to clone.
As a web developer, I am more interested in seeing all browser being 100% compliant with the w3c standards than anything else.
As a surfer, though, I want my browser to be fast on loading, handle bookmarks properly, and to start quickly. That is why I almost exclusively use Phoenix, despite it being only version 0.5 (at least, that's the one I am using). It starts up on my windows machine much faster than IE, Mozilla or Opera. I don't use Netscape itself, because the difference between that and Mozilla is negligible (yep, I know it's blasphemy to say it, but there it is.)
But to me, the most important part of the whole equation is this: give me WEBSITES that comply to standards as set by w3c. No, you don't HAVE to use CSS, or even a particular scripting method (php vs asp? who cares. If you know one, design with it, but be ready to learn the other if a company wants it).
Part of the problem is that a lot of people making websites are not programmers, or even really that informed about standards. A lot of sites are done by graphic designers, who only want it to be pretty.
Thats great, but pretty doesn't mean a thing to the people surfing with an alternate browser that doesn't display pictures. People who are blind come to mind. But if you come from an art background, its hard to think about that. It's worse than you think, though. I know a man who teaches at a University here locally. He teaches graphic design, holds a Ph.D. from a presitigious university (I think Texas A&M), and regularly requires his students to create web pages as part of the course. He uses almost nothing but Adobe products (GoLive in particular), and Macs. He doesn't worry about accessibility that much though, and he is COLOR BLIND! Standards don't seem to matter, as long as it looks good.
With that kind of situation being common, it is going to take a long time to make the community aware of the need for standard compliance.
Now that I am off my soap box, any one who needs it is free to borrow it.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
While I completely agree that mozilla is very good with standards, esp w3c standards, it still has a way to go. This might be flame bait but have you ever tried to make a website that uses pure css2 layout that looks the same in opera, mozilla and ie (latest versions). It's almost impossible. Yes a lot of that is due to the fact that IE's standards compliance in CSS2 is abismal to say the least but still Mozilla is getting stuff wrong as well. I wish the W3C would put out a reference implementation so that the browsers could hammer out these stupid little differences.
1) Because in some ways, the browser is the most important piece of software we use. Modern computers are valuable not so much for computation, but for communication.
2) Because if the browser is done well (like Mozilla or Opera) it can handle other tasks as well, like email and usenet, thus improving the whole user experience (yes, I know some versions of Opera don't do email anymore, but some do, or at least did).
3) Because if the browser is done well (like Mozilla) it can become a platform for running new classes of application, which brings all sorts of interesting things to light.
4) BUT, MOST IMPORTANTLY, if the browser is done badly (IE), it becomes a ready-made backdoor into your system, a virus and worm propagator, a stumbling block in the way of people trying to innovate in other areas, and in general, a royal pain in the ass. If there weren't alternatives to IE, there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth (cats and dogs, living together, etc).
To sum up:
Browser innovation is what saves us from having to use crappy proprietary tools like the rest of the rubes, and what allows us to actually get some use out of our computers (instead of being hacked ten times a day by bored script kiddies).
Or is that too cynical a take on this?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
seems to me to be about why Gecko/Mozilla is better than anything, namely Safari. It seems to boil down to "Mozilla is better because it is truely open-source."
Personally, I liked Mozilla (well now I use Phoenix on windows, less bloat) on windows and I used Chimera on Mac OS X. Chimera didn't crash as often as IE 5.2 did plus it had tabs and was faster. Once Safari was reveiled I jumped instantly. (The introduction of tabs has made me never look back)
The real big thing that grabbed me with Safari was the Bookmark management and the orange arrow thing (I forget what it is called) While they may be small, they feel like big end-user innovations. It just kind of irks me that the Author implies the only reason I use Safari is because it is "bundled" with Mac OS X. I use it by choice because it feels better. I could care less if my browser renders a page a half second faster.
There seems to be a great divide between the Microsoft World and the *nix World. The former creates easy to use software at the expense of power, and the later creates the reverse. The middle ground MUST be reached.
Perfect example: I bought a new box, installed Redhat 7.2, ran Netscape, viewed a couple web pages. Looks like absolute crap! Don't tell me about getting new fonts and blah blah blah--thats not my problem. Even if the software is free, the goal is to make me (the customer) want to use it. I don't have the time or energy to fiddle around with settings all day and night. I just want it to work. When I see a webpage in browser XYZ, I want it to look the same as it does in IE 6.0 on my windows box. You know why? Because 94.5% of visitors to my website use IE, and 97.5% use Windows. I know that IE renders things "wrong", but because of those percentages, that makes it right, and everyone else wrong. So why can't Netscape/Gecko/Mozilla/etc render things the way I want them to? And until they do, I'm using IE.
All of this talk about ECMAScript, XUL, all of these new technologies that will make my life so wonderfully easy mean nothing to me until they become adopted, and they will never become adopted until they are easy to use. That should be the focus area--not cool techno addons that 0.0001% of sites will utilize. I want my browsing experience to be simple and powerful, but simple is more important.
Mike
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
There has been some interesting stuff done with browsers recently. However innovation seems limited to the GUI. I suggest that we should innovate to the left of the URL's ":".
When mozilla (the initial NC*SA browser) came on the scene it did something that had not been done before -- it put a common GUI in front of multiple protocols - http, ftp, and gopher.
Since that time we've added what? Well, there's https, which was a necessary addition for commerce & security. But how many new applications have appeared on the 'net since 1992? A lot - like all those P2P applications, multimedia streamiing (mp3, ogg, video), etc. We have been content to allow the number of 'net clients grow, but why? Why not incorporate these into the browser experience? Why not support new protocols s they go mainstream, or at least have a way to support plug-ins at this level?
Doing this would strike fear at the very core of proprietary browser vendors. This is what MS didn't want Netscape to become -- an OS-agnostic platform for the Internet. To MS' credit, they have limited what people think a browser should be and have made the battle about speed and content plugin support. I say we change the rules of the game - produce protocol plugin support and begin development that leaves the current concept of a browser in the dust.
Now that would be true innovation.
Quoth Mitchell Baker:
Everything we've seen suggests that KHTML has a ways to go to catch up with rendering real web pages. At the same time, Gecko should become smaller and simpler.
This statement and the fact that Apple chose KHTML over Gecko seems to resonate with a comment I saw the other day about OS X. "Apple realized that it's easier to put a good GUI on UNIX than to debug Windows."
I am all for the improvement of Gecko, whatever slimming down it needs, but I don't think Apple was so mistaken to choose KHTML. From what I can tell, it's a smaller project and I think they will undoubtedly have more of an influence on it than they would on Gecko/Mozilla. It shouldn't be anay more difficult to extend KHTML, at least not any more difficult than it would be to speed up Mozilla.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
It's not subtext-- the author plainly states, "We would have preferred to have Apple use Gecko or collaborate with us on the development of the Camino browser...", but goes on to say that the larger goal of providing alternative, standards-compliant browser platforms is still being met.
I read the whole thing as, "we would love to have Apple as part of our team, but are still happy that there is another team out there doing The Right Thing."
While the Aqua user interface elements necessitate a binary end product for the time being, it is reasonable to expect two-way traffic between the Apple folks and the folks responsible for the care and feeding of the KHTML widget. As I understand it, some of this has already happened. Apple's decision to base Safari on KHTML is good for both Apple and KDE, and represents a departure in the right direction from a completely closed development model.
It may even be ideal-- all the standards based parts are out in the open for access by the community, and Apple is free to add their own proprietary icing on top of that foundation.
It does take a leap of faith that Apple will release their changes to the KHTML base, but it is most likely in their best interest to do this.
Because GIFs are still an efficient, non-lossy bitmapped format for NON-photographic images, such as charts and diagrams. This is an area where SVG can eventually save the day, but until they are widely implemented and used, GIFs very much have a use. They may continue to have a use for very complicated line art or tables where the equivalent SVG description might exceed that of the GIF in size.
--- Ban humanity.
Don't just keep the focus on Web browsers, folks, ALL software needs innovation. Just last night, working on a term project, one task the project asks me to do ends up crashing Microsoft Project.
... there's something better than that folks. Sofware should work first time, almost every time, and it should never be so screwed up that it can make changes that will produce a file that it can crash itself.
Think of all the crashes, all the viruses, all the wasted trying to figure out what the plicken plick is wrong with your sound driver and why your computer isn't pumping out sound
That is the destiny of free source software - to replace all proprietary, bug-riddled software with an OS and software selection that is reviewed again and again, improved constantly, can be installed as simply as dragging a folder to a window, or with an intuitive, inexperienced end-user friendly installation method.
Diversity is great folks, but I would still not switch to Linux and never have want for something on MacOS or Windows in terms of software, not bugs and virii. I did install Linux on a PowerPC machine once - LinuxPPC. It presented me with the LinuxPPC partition option, and that didn't work. Unix SVR4 did work, to my complete incomprehension..
There shouldn't be any need to partition to install an OS, it should just work. Do that, and Linux will be miles ahead of Windows. Give me an OS that is as simple as clicking a few buttons to install, without partitioning or anything low-level, and will auto-configure all hardware drivers and work the first time, every time. That's close right now, as far as I see Linux development from my viewpoint.
But why Linux development isn't going wholesale after Microsoft's core strength of Windows, Office, and highly integrated Internet software, I don't know. That is what is giving Microsoft the monopoly, is its desktop stranglehold. That is the stranglehold that is causing people all sorts of money in virus software, lost productivity due to crashes and file corruptions, and overall misery because the OS and software are proprietary crap.
And yes, I know software can never be bug-free, but it can be way better than Microsoft-brand software that has the ability to crash itself. Losing a term project was just one problem I've had with Windows machines over the past 10 weeks. I've also got a Zip disk that will bring allmighty Windows XP to its knees, crash it every single time I put the disk in. The OS is completely incapable of saying "Ok, forget whatever the problem is, and give the user of formating the drive or recovering the files." That may not be feasible, but if it can be done it should be done for the sake of saving someone who has important work on their disks and Winblows bugs attack.
I can't imagine all the work that is being lost in the windows world because of unnecessary levels of bugs and corrupted software that Microsoft can't fix. They even testify that their software is so screwed up that it isn't fixable, and would cause massive breaches in the Internet and "national security".
That is the problem Linux must solve - getting rid of Microsoft's stranglehold with better, more reliable, faster software with all the features, the same or better ease of use, and a simple experience that avoids the need for users to ever have to see a command line. Linux can also forever rid the world of DRM and patents on software, like ridiculous patents on garbage can icons and other silly things, by eradicating the market for that software.
So yeah, browser wars are good, mmmkay? But the war should be a unified free/open front attacking the proprietary regime. And there can be no browser war without looking to the larger picture of Internet integration in the OS. That means, for free/open browsers to win the browser war, they must win the OS war, or else any hope of conflict in the browser market will be a small distraction from Microsoft holding the main field.
End of rant.
Large gaps? Perhaps if you are the kind of person who would describe the Earth as a "large rock".
That's not the way I remember it. The "new features I remember were channels (ignored by virtually everybody), the ability to embed a page on your desktop (ignored by virtually everybody), and the fact that it was embedded into Windows 98.
Users don't care about the quality of the code. The users were getting sucked up into the MS machine simply because they used the defaults. This could have been avoided, but Netscape went four years or so without a major release.
During that time they were dropped as the default by virtually all ISPs, the only significant source of new users.
During that time, developers started to use CSS, and as less and less people were using Netscape, and as the support for CSS in Netscape 4.x was terrible, websites began to look worse and worse for Netscape users. The quality of Netscape dropped through the floor in terms of what its users were getting out of it.
Actually, plenty of people still use it (mostly organisations that standardised on it years back). Netscape 4.8 was released just a few months ago.
That's the primary benefit (for me) of having IE embedded into the OS. People automatically get newer versions of IE as they upgrade their OS to use all the new applications that come out. It's virtually the only thing that can force a user to upgrade his browser.
The users don't even know what CSS is. They don't see its effects or IE bugs, because virtually all web authors are force to code workarounds for IE or lose visitors.
Where something works better in other browsers, most visitors won't even know because most users only use one browser.
If that's the case, go buy an IntelliMouse Explorer. One with two thumb buttons on the left side (in addtion to the two buttons + mouse wheel on top). You can use the two thumb buttons to go back and forth with one click. Plus, the explorer is an awesome mouse to begin with... no cleaning out gunk on the wheels.
:^)
It is kind of finny actually--
I might be a bit of a Linux advocate, but Microsoft mice and trackballs are *wonderful.* In fact, I mostly use the Intellimouse Optical Trackball (I find I have fewer hand problems with a trackball than a mouse). Microsoft makes killer pointing devices
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Innovation in Mozilla need to stop for a couple of months in order to fix all the Bugs #.
This is what happends:
you have a constant number of developers but an incriesing number of inovation. Every innovation has an increising number of bugs reports. Developer have a constant capacity of fixing bugs.
So, do the Math. Mozilla can't support so many innovations in every release because the number of developers are not incriesing.
What do we need? An aplication with costant features that has no bugs, or an aplication that has many features but is buggy?
Seems to me that this innovation stuff is more like a marketing campaing. Sad to hear that the campaing is comming from the development department and not from the marketing department.
BTW, I love Mozilla and I use it every day since Netscape 2.0
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
IE is not dying -- it's getting killed by Microsoft. Microsoft never wanted the web to succeed. It doesn't pay their bills to have open standards. Primary reason why they undertook browser war was to shift the focus back on it's own networking model -- client is primary. Future plans for IE seem to become an install program for .NET apps. Maintaining IE in semi-complient with current standards manner is secondary.
I there was some way to give you a 6 for that comment!
That's exactly it. Mundanes use what came with the computer. The attitude is often "Well, this is what came with the computer, it works, why switch?" They don't know what software is on there, nor do they even care.
However, if you give them a compelling enough reason to switch, they will. Everyone who has ever complained to me about popup ads I've showed them Mozilla or Phoenix. Most of those people ended up adopting the alternative browser. Why? Because popups were a big enough pain to cause the switch. Did most care about tabs or standards compliancy or a skinnable GUI? Not really.
People *will* switch -- there just has be a good enough reason...
My journal has hot
Optimoz [mozdev.org] (for Mozilla [mozilla.org] has mouse gestures, too, you ignorant clod.
People like you are the reason I spent $39 for Opera and $15 for subsequent upgrades.
'Same speed C but faster'
I'm sorry, but I must say that much of this article seems to be whining that Apple went with KHTML instead of Gecko.
Opera has become my browser of choice. It's interface is not weighted down by the complex XUL. It creates new windows lightning quick, and loads the content much faster. I have a native FreeBSD version that supports nice AA fonts, and looks fabulous. For some reason, it's tabbed layout seems absolutely natural, whereas all the other browsers' tabs seem forced.
That article was nothing to do with browser innovation. Instead, it was yet another Mozilla enthusiast's attempt to understand Apple's decision to use KHTML rather than Gecko. It's understandable that Mozilla deveopers would be confused about this decision because Gecko is fairly obviously the better engine. However, as the writer acknowleges, KHTML has the killer advantage of easy-to-comprehend source code.
As for "Browser innovation", I consider Mozilla full-featured and standards-compliant to an exemplary degree, but I do not consider it innovative. I can only think of one feature that Mozilla has "innovated" since becoming Open Source, and that is XUL. The other things - themability, tabbed browsing, the sidebar, mouse gestures, popup blocking, etc, etc, were all copied from other browsers.
Mozilla is a worthy browser and IMO Gecko is the best rendering engine available. Nonetheless, I use Opera, and I think that's where the article writer comes unstuck. When choosing a browser, I don't think about XUL, and while I do care about standards-compliance, it has to take a back seat to usability.