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The Future of Browser Choice
New submitter plawson writes "CNET offers an in-depth discussion of the browser's future, making the case that 'new mobile devices threaten to stifle the competitive vigor of the market for Web browsers on PCs.' Given the vertical integration of many mobile systems, the article predicts that 'the only opportunity you'll get to truly change browsers is when your two-year smartphone contract expires.' The trade-offs are security and performance. Web pages that rely on JavaScript and JIT will be big losers. How important is browser choice on a smartphone or tablet compared with a PC?"
While mobile devices like iPhone certainly have larger market penetration than Chrome OS, the restrictive way Google has chosen to take is clear.
Unlike Chromium OS, which can be compiled from the downloaded source code, Chrome OS only ships on specific hardware from Google's manufacturing partners. The user interface takes a minimalist approach, resembling that of the Google Chrome web browser. Since Google Chrome OS is aimed at users who spend most of their computer time on the Web, the only application on the device is a browser incorporating a media player and a file manager.
I think this is a much larger problem towards open systems. Not only is Google bundling their own browser (what Microsoft was accused of), it is the only browser you are allowed to use.
On top of that, other developers aren't allowed on the system - you cannot run non-google native programs at all. And how do you get work done? You're supposed to use Google's cloud-hosted "applications", that again put your data behind online services and gives Google freedom to end support any time they want (and of course, mine all your data and usage).
How do you play games? Oh, buy them via Google Play Store (or use data mining advertising supported versions) made with Google-owned PPAPI programming technique of course!
Internet connection goes down or is slow? Well, too bad. I mean, Diablo 3 works perfectly too!
Google is a far more serious threat to open computer systems than any other company, including Apple, Microsoft and IBM.
My iPhone lets me choose from Safari and dozens of different skins of Safari
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Will no-one look to history to see what happens if you are tied into a single browser? Would we all be happy to have the equivalent of IE6 on our smartphones?
I know Microsoft is not keen on WebGL or Websockets, so imagine a world where they simply did not exist, or failed to gain traction because there was no incentive for the new monopoly to support it.
The only answer is consumer choice, and we all know 2 years is a lifetime in 'internet time'. Smartphone time is just as fast as that used to be.
There are options for example I run firefox on my phone (just so I can use ad block plus) and there are many more available in the android store. The only problem is the same one that desktops have of people not changing away from the pre-bundled browser.
Jailbreak and install whatever browser you want. Or better yet, stop shipping restricted computers that are dressed up to look like phones, and start shipping computers that respect user freedom and which happen to come in phone-form-factor with a cell phone module. Why is this so hard?
Palm trees and 8
If you ever get the chance too...
Frolic in Placenta
mindscrambler
hurts so good!
I don't see why there are concerns about browsers lagging and lack of competition - it's just that now instead of browsers competing on the desktop, browsers will be competing across multiple devices.
Yes it means that you personally will have to use the brand of browser that comes with your device, but that does NOT mean you are stuck with the same browser for the life of your contract as long as you chose a device that gets updated through the lifetime of your contract.
It also does not mean Javascript performance will lag, since competing device makers will always want to have the fastest possible browsers... both Android and iOS are making good strides in improving javascript performance in the browsers they offer.
Also it's not like you cannot install other browsers. Of course on Android you can do so if you like, and supposedly soon Chrome may be released for iOS.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or a secure platform with lots of choice that requires a bit of savvy to use. It's amazing what people will put up with to avoid using their brains.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Just 2 weeks ago I asked with you guys what degree I should get for a late-ish career boost (BTW: Once again thanks for all the feedback, it's been a great help!).
It is because of this entire development that I actually am starting to move away from web stuff. It may seem that the web has won, and with Ajax and regular HTML 5 that may be the case, but it also is true that a few years ago we had a well-ordered world with 3 platforms at most and now with the mobile revolution we pratically are back in the 80ies with a bazillion proprietary platforms none of which are really compatible to one another. ... Even the usage paradigms aren't as clear as they were in 2005 with only Win, Mac and *nix desktops to choose from.
As for the dangers of stagnation and lock-in - even with HTML5/CSS3 and Ajax - due to extreme verticalisation of markets, I'd say the GP and the related article are spot on. That's why I'm moving away from rich-client and web stuff, at least for the programming that's supposed to earn me stable money in the long term. The 2k years were a great time with lots of fun and opportunities in the web, but those are dimishing as we speak. At least for me it's time to move on.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
All mobile browsers, save for WP7, are WebKit.
Posted from my N9, using webkit.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
For years I have used IE, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, Safari for Windows, but far and away, the best is Pale Moon!
Sure are a lot of options out there if you don't want to be tied to a contract. I got a new LG Alley phone for about $100 bucks on ebay, and signed up with page plus celluar. Cheap pay as you service, uses all the Verizon toweras, and I can do anything and load any browser I want.
Be flexible, but stand up to the man.
Kurt
the article predicts that 'the only opportunity you'll get to truly change browsers is when your two-year smartphone contract expires.'
That's the good news. There will still be change, and there will still be competition, but the pace will be slower / the stakes will be higher. Much better for everyone except paid browser devs.
(What I do / what I need my browser to do) hasn't changed much in years, yet there's an endless spewing stream of "just like before, except now does something you don't want and/or don't care about". Combined with a handy bit of gratuitous UI screwing up, and occasionally adding (or removing) features that addons used to successfully provide.
Sometimes its funny to imagine the whole paradigm and ecosystem of web browsers applied to other apps:
Imagine a "less" command that had major version number changes every week, and the only change the end users noticed was they swapped the pgup and pgdn keys because the UI designers said it was more intuitive. After all, when you hit page down, the page doesn't actually go down in your viewport, the imaginary paper is scrolling upwards past your viewpoint, right? So hit page up to read the next screen of the scroll. And because the only users that matter are new users, and this should make it easier for them, I guess we'll just have to do it.
Imagine a "gcc" that suddenly required all language keywords to be entered as "pig latin" instead of "english". Probably about ten years ago there was a weird translator for Perl that made it operate in ancient Latin, which I thought was pretty funny at the time.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
ummm that wud be news...
Why would a browser need low level access? Part of the job of the OS is to act as a middle man between applications and the hardware. It seems like Microsoft is to blame on the WindowsRT problem. IE should be communicating with the OS to produce functionality, not by-passing it. Whether it is the broser, rendering engine, or a compiler, there should by APIs available to all software.
or at least one that's been asked a million times before.
the question is whether you want to use an appliance or a general-purpose device. an appliance is relatively fixed-format, and congruent with the concept of a walled garden, as well as revenue plans that make your vendors mbaciles happy. an appliance normally does not have user-serviceable parts, so the vendor is in control of the UX. appliances are fundamentally fixed-function devices, even if the vendor is able to update and even extend it, since they define what the fixed functions are.
being general-purpose is the opposite: it means that the owner really does own (control) the device, and can change its function, install software without regard to what the device vendor provides, approves or even knows about. PCs are fully general-purpose, since everything, from the roms to the OS to add-in cards can be replaced by the device owner.
so the question is really: to what extent is the vendor trying to draw a line across which the device owner cannot cross? no device is truely fixed-function, and even control-freak vendors like Apple provide _some_ affordances through which the device may be extended (hardware connectors, software app-stores). this has always been controversial, since any vendor restriction is at odds with our natural understanding of what "ownership" means (and even companies like Apple tend to show some variance in how locked-down and fixed-function their devices are - I can install Linux on an Apple laptop/desktop without much trouble, but they put a lot of effort into making it hard to root any of the smaller devices.)
I think it's time we get back to basics: when I buy a device, I should completely control it. any anti-rooting mechanisms should be illegal - the same way it would be illegal for a car vendor to specifically detect and sabotage my car if I put on third-party wheels. sure, make me click through a license-revoking agreement. but if you sell me something, and then take control of it out of my hands, you've committed fraud.
we should not allow this issue to become an opportunity for vendors to segment their market by selling a version for tinkerers and another for grandma. mostly, vendors have this impulse because their mbaciles want to lock in customers. instead of just selling devices, the popularity of which is subject to whim, the mbacilic approach is to sell service contracts as well, preferably multi-year, to ensure that customers can't get away without paying, even if the vendor's quality degrades. fixed-function devices are inherently like long-term contracts, since customers want upgrades and new apps, and since they're locked in, you can shove profitable advertising down their digital throats, or at least mine their usage/search behaviors.
It wouldn't matter that much to me because unless the content served up on my iPhone is designed for a mobile platform, it is almost impossible tor read, so I prefer the APP to the browser. as long as it is free, that is.
occasionally i do need to go to a website, and it is kind of a hellish experience because the sites I need to go to (local store's hours, phone #) are written for a desktop browser.
so unless the browser can magically convert a poorly designed website into something readable in a mobile format, it won't make a difference. (i'm also assuming mom&pop shops on the interwebz won't shell out cash for two platform designs, since they are still using flashing fonts and high-contrast tiled gif backgrounds.. ugh)
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I could just say, LMGTFY, but how about a direct link instead.
Just a rumor for now but since you can't replace the default system browser I could see Apple allowing it. Over time they are generally more permissive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have pretty much given up browsing on my phone in anything other than an information emergency. All the mobile browsers suck balls, and ports are clunky on the smaller platform. Give me a full-featured browser on my mobile device, or I will stick to tethering it to a real computer.
And I'm sure there are car geeks simply appalled with the car you own, food geeks who would vomit in horror at what you eat, beer/wine geeks who would rather die of thirst than drink whatever it is you like, music geeks who would pierce their eardrums rather than listen to your music collection, etc.
Basically, not everybody in this world actually cares about the same stuff you do, at the same level of intensity.
"You don't have some unique brain power that others lack."
Yes we do, I have worked in the Corporate world long enough to see it clearly.
We have that unique desire to learn and embrace change. The rest of the corporate world, Change is usually met with angry mobs holding pitchforks and torches.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I choose to spend my time that way because it pays off. If you spend a little time up front learning, and it saves you more time than you spent, that's a wise investment. If you choose not to do that, maybe you deserve to be condescended to.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
i regularly use 4 different browsers on android depending on the site:
built-in browser
chrome beta
dolphin hd
miren browser
choice is good. also i tend to use web apps more than regular apps for security reasons. for example i don't use the facebook app, i just use dolphin hd and send a desktop user agent.
Or a platform with only one browser engine with a security vulnerability (like the one that allowed to rootkit your phone after opening a web page) and you need to wait weeks for a fix, and not being able to use other browser engine in that time. Or other platform thatallows you to install another "real" browser meanwhile the embeeded one is fixed. Choice is always good, nobody is forcing the user to use another one, but the option must exist
If spending extra time learning how to drive enabled me to drive a special vehicle that worked a lot better than regular vehicles, you might have a point. But it doesn't.
For instance, if driving a manual transmission meant that I'd get twice the gas milage and break down only 1/10th as often, then you'd have to be stupid not to drive a manual transmission. As it actually happens, manual tramsissions only provide a marginal benefit, so whatever you prefer works.
Basically, not everybody in this world actually cares about the same stuff you do, at the same level of intensity.
It's not about what I care about, it's about what you care about and the best way to accomplish that. If you don't care about computer security or speed, by all means use whatever you like best. If you actually want security or speed, then there is a right answer.
And most people do want computer security and speed. I'm always listening to people complain about viruses, or how bogged down their computer is with crapware. If you care about those things, there's an easy solution. Think about what you're doing, and don't do it unless you understand the implications. That holds for every field, computers, cars, brewry or anything else.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
We have that unique desire to learn and embrace change.
Slashdot posters actually believe this.
(From the article and summary) Web pages that rely on JavaScript and JIT will be big losers.
The author claims this, but his "proof" is based on the upcoming Windows 8. Since we're talking about mobile browsers here... what Safari and Chrome do are relevant - what Windows Mobile is going to do is basically irrelevant until Microsoft figures out how to steal marketshare back from the two runaway leaders. Mobile Safari and Chrome handle javascript very well - so this conclusion is based on basically nothing.
#DeleteChrome
Joey: So, what happens when you're wrong?
Nick: Well, Joey, I'm never wrong.
Joey: But you can't always be right.
Nick: Well, if it's your job to be right, then you're never wrong.
Joey: But what if you are wrong?
Nick: Okay, let's say that you're defending chocolate and I'm defending vanilla. Now, if I were to say to you, "Vanilla's the best flavor ice cream", you'd say �
Joey: "No, chocolate is."
Nick: Exactly. But you can't win that argument. So, I'll ask you: So you think chocolate is the end-all and be-all of ice cream, do you?
Joey: It's the best ice cream; I wouldn't order any other.
Nick: Oh. So it's all chocolate for you, is it?
Joey: Yes, chocolate is all I need.
Nick: Well, I need more than chocolate. And for that matter, I need more than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom and choice when it comes to our ice cream, and that, Joey Naylor, that is the definition of liberty.
Joey: But that's not what we're talking about.
Nick: Ah, but that's what I'm talking about.
Joey: But ⦠you didn't prove that vanilla's the best.
Nick: I didn't have to. I proved that you're wrong, and if you're wrong, I'm right.
Joey: But you still didn't convince me.
Nick: Because I'm not after you. I'm after them.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Actually, it requires far less savvy than it used to.
For instance, this was the install process I went through earlier this week to install Linux Mint:
1. Download CD image from the Mint website.
2. Burn the CD image.
3. Reboot the machine to boot from the CD. This was the hardest step for the non-techie, because in my case I had to teach the BIOS to try booting from the CD.
4. Wait for the liveCD to start up.
5. Click the big icon on the desktop that said "Install to hard disk".
6. Answer some questions:
A. What language I wanted to use (default was US English)
B. Whether I wanted to do anything weird with disk partitions (I did, but if I didn't have 3 other setups on the same box I could have just accepted the defaults)
C. My name, username, and an initial password
7. Wait 15-20 minutes. The installer showed some slides about what features Mint has that are clearly end-user friendly.
8. When instructed, remove the CD from the tray and reboot the machine.
9. Wait for it to start up, log in and use it. It popped up with some nice instructions on how to use it for those not familiar with Firefox, LibreOffice, etc.
It's hard to make it much simpler than that. And I've put non-techies in front of a Linux machine and they were able to figure it out without much difficulty.
I am officially gone from
From the summary:
Two things wrong with this statement:
1. A browser lacking JIT will still process JavaScript, just more slowly.
2. While a web page might lose a few impatient users, and thus become a secondary loser, the primary loser is the one who is the subject of the summary: the smartphone user who is locked in to a particular browser.
Taking these together, the statement "Users who rely on JIT will be losers" would be more accurate.
Good! Maybe it'll restrain the ridiculousness that is seeping into web pages these days. We're returning to the bad old days where you had to use different browsers for different websites for them to work properly and I for one don't want to see a return to that!
A little time? For someone to whom tech comes easily maybe. Would you be happy being condescended to by someone who finds something easy that you don't?
Until it does something unexpected and there are a million different non-working answers on Google. That's why I'm typing this on a Mac.
Seriously, being stuck in Contract Hell is a sure sign you're not a Geek, you're a Pseudo-Geek.
Tablets can run browser instances fairly easily, if you're Geek enough.
I see this more as winnowing out the chaff (non-Geeks pretending to be Geeks) from the grain (Geeks).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This article has a Java Icon. Because "Java, JavaScript, whatever, it's all the same"? Perhaps "mobile" isn't the big threat here.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
its no wonder it didnt do well, all the silly people who liked closed systems, shall i dare to say.. "with only one marketplace", already have a product.. and its called ipads. or any product the itunes marketplace supports.
Google probably would have done a million times better if they teamed up with amazon for music/video.
Anyway, i'll get a smart phone when it's more like a medical scanner in star-trek.. at least thats kind of smart and you dont have to stare at tiny letters for a primitive website/game.
Android phones and tablets come with a stock browser but you certainly aren't limited to that alone. There are plenty of others available through Google Play including Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Dolphin and many more.
These are not common problems inevitably arriving because of tablets. This is an Apple thing. Stay the hell away from Apples and it's no problem. I have the Android browser, Opera Mobile, and Dolphin on my phone. I have Opera Mini, Dolphin Mini, Maxthon, and Skyfire as several more popular browsers to choose from if I decided I needed even more, as well as firefox and Netfront. These aren't just skins; webkit (android browser for instance), opera, and firefox are completely seperate codebases, and the browsers that use webkit are still modified enough to be completely different from each other. Several are MUCH faster than the stock browser.
Okay -- I RTFM'd, and it seems like the author can't really see the forest for the trees.
Sure, UI is important, but if you're worried about us developing a browser monoculture, you need to look at the rendering engine, and not the UI and trademark that is slapped onto the result.
And as things currently stand, a monoculture is already forming around Webkit. On the PC side, KHTML, Konqueror, Safari, and Chrome all use Webkit (as well as numerous more minor browsers). On the mobile side, iOS, Chromebooks, Android, Symbian S60 browser, Blackberry browser (6.0+), HP's webOS, and Amazon's Silk all run on Webkit.
Looking at WikiMedia's stats for April 2012 (link), it appears from my rough calculations that nearly 36% of HTML page hits were from Webkit based browsers -- more than for any other browser engine. When looking at just mobile browsers, Webkit accounts for more than 80% of page hits from mobile devices.
Personally, I don't see this as a bad thing. While it was bad when Microsoft's Triton engine held near total dominance in browser engine use on the Internet (bad because it was tied to a single platform and vendor, and didn't conform to W3C standards well (and in some cases, not at all)), having an Open Source Webkit, which is collaborated on by a wide variety of browser vendors and which does an excellent (and I'd say the best) job of conforming to web standards hold dominance is a good thing. It means we have a single standard that web developers can focus their efforts against (W3C standards that is), while allowing anyone to improve upon it and implement it as they see fit, on a plethora of devices.
Looking at the graph in the article, if you instead break it down by rendering engine, you'll see that at least 80% of their mobile visitors in March were running Webkit based browsers.
So if he's worried about "one browser dominating them all", he's looking at the wrong equation. The concern now isn't that one browser will become dominant; however it appears that one rendering engine will become dominant. IMO it's a good thing in the case of Webkit, due to its standards compliance and open source nature. Sure, you may not have a lot of choice of browsers on your mobile device, but competition between device manufacturers and the fact that virtually all of them ship with browsers based on the same browser engine will ensure a base level of rendering support, good standards compliance, and in the case of features all of them want/need that such changes can be made (where logical) to Webkit itself, and then trickle down to all of the mobile browsers. Looks like a whole lot of win to me.
Which isn't to say that I think lack of choice is a good thing in and of itself -- merely that when your choice is between three different browsers running on the same rendering engine (and many of them the same Javascript engine), will most people even care?
Yaz
So wait... the PC is dead and we'll all be browsing the internet on our 4" smartphone screens? That'll make reading anything longer than a sentence rather difficult... and wikipedia... wait, they're full of shit aren't they?
"Savvy" = installing antivirus software on your cell phone
Slashdot posters and techies in general have a superiority complex of enviable size. We see a brain surgeon fail miserably at troubleshooting his mail account so we assume that brain surgery is child's play.
It is the hallmark of an incompetent in a field not to respect the competence required in another field. When you hunker down and learn something properly as opposed to just become a techie, you gain humility as well as proficience.
That's an excellent solution, for as long as Apple doesn't try to push iOS style centralized control onto OS X.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As long as the person who is being condescending is also giving me information I need to know regarding a subject then I would be happy to be condescended to.
If you refuse to learn something because you don't like someones attitude then you are an idiot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
That would require me to install the centralized control update which I have the choice not to install. Plus there's nothing stopping me putting Linux on here, I just have better things to do with my time than fight with incomplete software.
They have... http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/05/23/1835216/no-patent-infringement-found-in-oracle-vs-google
And you are a liar and a wanker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanker
No-one is happy being condescended to and it never helps people to learn. That's one of the reasons why people struggle to learn IT skills, because of dicks like you treating them like shit. Now fuck off.
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/HowTo:Fuck_Off
The problem of WebKit is that it has BSD parts that may be susceptible to patents, and the core development is entirely in control of two huge for-profit corporations. Firefox/Gecko has the same problem (too many core devs from one company), and obviously so does Opera (not even open source).
But at least you have competition between those 3 teams now. If WebKit achieves total dominance, Google and Apple control the web, open source or not.
I looked on iTunes (hard to do, since I don't have and won't use any Apple device), and there is plenty of browsers to choose from for iOS devices.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aitunes.apple.com+web+browser&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=Palemoon:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=S4g&rls=Palemoon:en-US%3Aofficial&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:itunes.apple.com+%22web+browser%22&oq=site:itunes.apple.com+%22web+browser%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=serp.3...18908.21400.0.22126.2.2.0.0.0.0.102.195.1j1.2.0...0.0.2t5joqHSWMA&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=7e31dd1cd0ae5982&biw=1067&bih=771
130,000+ hits.
Well at least Mozilla is proposing standards to advance web apps through its b2g project and coffeescript-inspired extensions to ecmascript do trickle into javascript.
Apple, nokia(wp7 division not Qt) and Google might not care (native app stores generate the $$$).
But hopefully smaller players like HP (open webOS), KDE (plasma active), Intel (tizen) and RIM (BB10) will add the necessary support to webkit.
But at least you have competition between those 3 teams now. If WebKit achieves total dominance, Google and Apple control the web, open source or not.
No, as the code is OSS, anyone can create a fork if they feel the direction Apple and Google are taking isn't the one they want to take.
And Apple and Google may be the two biggest kids in the WebKit sandbox, but don't discount RIM, Nokia(/Accenture), and Sansung, (and I imagine others -- this was just a quick list I was able to gather from looking at their svn commit logs for the past couple of weeks) who are also big companies that use and contribute to WebKit.
And being LGPL/BSD licensed, there isn't a whole lot Apple, Google, or anyone else can really do if they want to fork it. So i'm not too concerned about Google and Apple achieving "total dominance" -- particularly while Webkit still conforms to W3C standards as well as it does (as it's one of the most compliant engines out there, it's really the W3C that currently control the web -- which is how it's supposed to be).
Yaz
And it actually appears to have some innovation behind it, display results and the provoking queries on the same screen in a way that makes it easier to navigate between them:
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/23/killer-mobile-browser/#s:2012-05-23-at-15-34-51
http://axis.yahoo.com/
Well, I guess PC web browsers wil lack the kind of focus that
major market share provides....another page of history turns.
Film at eleven!
Who gives a shit about being happy about a situation, either make the situation work for you or be a little whinny bitch.
I see which choice you have chosen.
idiot: someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.