Will new browsers really upgrade the web?
Published: 18 Jun 2009 12:59 BST
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…
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