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The Browser Counter-Revolution

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:45:33 +0000

Like every other red-blooded computer-savvy slightly anti-disestablishmentarian rebel, I switched from the “home” browser to Firefox years ago. The little non-profit that could, the Mozilla Foundation, was supposed to be our computer generation’s answer to the big corporate behemoths, Apple and Microsoft. Switching to Mozilla’s Firefox browser from the Mac’s Safari or Window’s Internet Explorer was supposed to help us identify with the little guy, the “real people,” the people on the barricades fighting “the man.”

I’m sorry to go all 60’s on you, but that was the feeling during the heady days of the Firefox rebellion, for lack of a better term. But like all revolutions, this one seems to have petered out, and the establishment – both MS and Apple – have been quietly making improvements, to the extent that many users are rediscovering their browser roots, using the built-in applications in their operating systems. That, combined with what has become a plethora of add-ons – many of which are totally unnecessary, but which you can’t help installing anyway – has made FF much harder to manage, at least for me. Is Firefox crashing (at least once every couple of days now) because I keep thirty or so tabs open during my sessions? But shouldn’t 4 GB of memory be enough for what, for me, is “normal use?”

I haven’t made the switch away from Firefox yet, and I may not; I have to say I’m hooked on some of FF’s add-ons that I haven’t seen yet in Internet Explorer 8. But after a recent spate of FF crashes, I decided to check out the alternative – and I was surprised by the advances made by Internet Explorer, now in its eighth iteration.

For example: IE8 now has accelerators, which lets you highlight text on a web page and then further explore information on that topic from a variety of web sources. You could highlight a name for example, and search for it on Linkedin, Facebook, and other social media services, click on a domain name and get information about Alexa, search for a product at Walmart or Amazon, etc. It mimics – actually surpasses – one of the features I find most useful in FF, where I have an add-on that lets me highlight and right-click on highlighted text, and search for it in Google. But with IE8 accelerators, I have many more search options than just Google. You know the tables have turned when you find a Firefox extension called IE8 Activities, which, according to the page, is “an implementation of IE8 Activities (now called Accelerators) for Firefox.”

Or: IE8 also comes with something called Web Slices, which allows you to check information on a page – just the information you’re interested in – from the toolbar. If a Web Slice is available on a page, a green Web Slices icon will appear in the Command Bar. Click on the icon to easily subscribe and add the Web Slices to the Favorites Bar so you can keep track of that “slice” of the web. Here, too, FF is playing catch-up; this site suggests installing a Firefox add-on called Webchunks to allow FF users to have access to IE8 slices. “All of the web slices available there work just great in Firefox,” the page says – but “keep in mind that some may look a little ugly, due in part to them being created for IE!” Note, by the way, that big bad corporate Microsoft has donated the specifications of Web Slices to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.

Other very nice implementations of important features in IE 8 include Smartscreen, which warns you when you surf to dangerous pages (and which consistently gets top reviews in the anti-phishing and anti-malware categories); tab isolation, which dumps a bad tab, instead of crashing the whole browser when something bad happens; and enhanced privacy capabilities, using InPrivate Browsing. You can get similar functionality for all these features using Firefox add-ons, by the way.

Which is exactly the point. Besides a revolutionary spirit, many people (including myself) moved to FF years ago because it just had a better feature set, because of the available add-ons. But, as many FF users have learned, add-ons have their price, in increased memory use and eventual instability, leading to crashes. IE8 has built many of their new features directly into the browser code, which should lead to more stability. One could assume that the people who developed the browser would ensure that whatever features were built into it would be compatible with other features, while a third-party writing an add-on might not be aware of all the secrets and bugs under the hood, even if the browser is open source. So you get the same (or better) functionality in IE8 – with better stability and fewer crashes.

If that’s sounds like an argument for corporatism – IE8 is certainly not open source – I would remind you that Firefox is now developed and marketed not by the Mozilla Foundation, but the Mozilla Corporation, and while we wouldn’t deign to compare Microsoft Inc’s corporate culture with Mozilla’s (you have to believe things are free-er and easier at Mozilla), one has to assume that any corporation is going to have benchmarks, managers, office politics, quarterly goals, and pink slips. Like The Who sang, “Meet the new boss – same as the old boss.” The browser revolution is truly over, it seems.

Firefox’s Browser Share Drops While Google Chrome’s Rises (ostatic.com)
Microsoft forced to offer users a choice of web browsers (guardian.co.uk)
Firefox, Opera downloads soar after IE warnings (computerworld.com)

Night at the Opera

Tue, 29 May 2007 13:40:02 +0000

I was about to leave the browser thing alone for once and for all, having come to the conclusion that they’re all pretty much the same when it comes to being troublesome (albeit for different reasons, of course).

Having gone 15 rounds with Internet Explorer (6 and 7), Firefox and Safari (the default browser on Macs, but also available for Windows systems), and finding them all having pluses and minuses, I was pretty much resigned to leaving things as they were on my systems. That meant running Safari as the default on the Mac and IE 7 on the PC, with Firefox installed on both for Web site integrity checks and for when I was in a “non-conformist” mood.

It appears that America On-Line has thrown in the towel, too, announcing this week that they are giving up on the one-time star of the browser business, Netscape (http://tinyurl.com/2akd88). With only 1% of the overall browser market, AOL said, it wasn’t making much of an impact on leader IE and second banana Firefox, and wasn’t likely to in the future either. According to http://tinyurl.com/2nd7oo, AOL wasn’t in it for the browser technology anyway. You would have thought, however, that AOL would have at least bundled Netscape as its default browser for customers of its Web service, but they didn’t. Netscape couldn’t beat IE, even after AOL won a lawsuit against Microsoft in 2003 (http://tinyurl.com/2gdaf5).

Eerily, another contender in the browser race last month filed a lawsuit against Microsoft over the monopolization of the browser market by IE (http://tinyurl.com/ysulpk). Norway-based Opera took its complaint to the European Commission, saying they were doing it for the “little guy,” for “all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them” when they install Windows and automatically get IE set up as their default browser. I certainly hope the Netscape precedent hasn’t set a paradigm for companies that sue Microsoft. That would certainly be a shame, because I have taken a liking to Opera recently – surprising even myself, since, as I said, I was ready to call it a day with browsers. Firefox was alright, I guess, but I used to find it crashing a lot, especially when loaded up with plug-ins (add-ons). Of course, I could have considerably reduced the memory requirements for FF by dumping some plug-ins (the program is flexible that way), but not using plug-ins ruins a large part of the Firefox experience. It’s a matter of relative deprivation, in the end – you’re using a browser that is supposed to avail you of all sorts of wonderful extras in the form of the mini-programs you install as part of Firefox, but the more you install the more memory the program demands, slowing things down and generally mucking up the works. It was with sorrow I said goodbye to FF, because, as everyone knows, Mozilla, the organization responsible for developing FF, has been at the forefront of challenging “the dark side, AKA Microsoft” (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that quote in user forums, blogs etc.).

On the other hand, the impression that many people seem to have of the Mozilla crowd – that of a bunch of geeks tirelessly laboring away for the good of the open source program using public – is a bit inaccurate, according to this piece in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12link.html). “Will Success Spoil Firefox?” the headline screams, while the article details Mozilla’s very profitable deal with Google, which netted the Mozilla people tens of millions last year, and allowed the Mozilla Foundation’s CEO to earn a half million dollars in 2006. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if the difference between Microsoft and Mozilla is not the ideological one many of us were led to believe it was, but a matter of corporate profits, it just removes some of the anti-establishment cachet from Firefox.

But of course, my reason for dumping Firefox had nothing to do with Mozilla’s corporate profits, just like my leaving IE had nothing to do with Microsoft’s monopolist or non-monopolist marketing policies.

Neither of them was perfect. The advantages of Firefox over IE6 are well known and obvious to anyone who has worked with both of them, and IE7 tries to correct some of those parities, inserting tabbed browsing and native RSS reading into the new generation of Internet Explorer, but it’s too little too late – and IE7 isn’t that smooth a performer either. And, FF’s memory tastes were too uptown for me.

What was left? Well, since I use a Macbook, I had another alternative – Safari, the built in Mac browser (now, as mentioned, available for Windows as well). The version I first used, Safari 2.x, was a simple browser with few extra tricks (sort of like a more stable IE6). It was a bit boring, but I have to admit it was nice to have something that knew its place and didn’t overtax the system’s memory.

But, of course, plain vanilla gets over-boring after awhile, and the urge to surf fancier pushed forth again. Around that time, Apple released a new, advanced version of Safari (version 3), which, after much soul-searching, I downloaded and installed. Safari 3 offered a surfing experience more like the one I knew from my Firefox days, but without the wide array of plug-ins available to FF users (there are a few, though). You would expect Safari 3 to work in perfect tandem with Mac OS, since, being made by Apple, “it just works” – but you’d be right only part of the time. Safari 3 doesn’t perform all that well, taking up lots of memory when it is active, and crashing too many times (something FF and IE don’t do that often).

Which leads me to Opera, the only contender left now that Netscape is out of the development picture. I had tried Opera a few years ago when it first came out, but it cost money. The registration fee was dropped in 2000, when it became ad-sponsored, but the ads were dropped in 2005, as well. Now it’s as free as the others. Opera doesn’t have much of a market share on desktops (http://tinyurl.com/2vmef9) but it dominates on cell phones and other non-traditional Internet setups (like the Wii).

Opera has a lot of nice features, some of which I haven’t explored yet and may never use (like Speed Dial, where you see little images of Web pages you can click on in order to navigate to more quickly). It does have a nice collection of Widgets, the rough equivalent of Firefox plug-ins – so it’s nice to have access to the local weather when I’m surfing, or be able to tune into Internet radio within a browser session. And, so far, it seems somewhat less memory-hungry than the alternatives.

Will the thrill last? Well, one thing I learned from making the rounds with browsers is that it probably won’t; each browser Eden has its own snake, eventually coming to the surface. The trick in beating snakes is to stay two steps ahead – and wear boo

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The Browser Counter-Revolution

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Night at the Opera