A Blog From Behind the Trenches

eWeek and other sites are making a big deal out of the new Bing browser toolbar allegedly copying features from social browser/Flock clone RockMelt.

Frankly, I don't get it.

Browsers have been copying each other since the dawn of time, and the press didn't seem to care much. Things like Speed Dial, popup blocking, full page zoom, sessions, private data deletion, and so on, were invented or pioneered by Opera, and are in use by other browsers today. Opera has also added features that were first seen in other browsers, such as private browsing and extensions.

Why do they care about this only now?

And as far as I can tell, the ideas in RockMelt aren't exactly novel, new or revolutionary either. Remember Flock?

Tom's Hardware has posted a rather thorough test of the top five browsers.

Opera is declared the speed winner, which is great, but there are also some questions popping up regarding a couple of the tests.

First, the slow loading of local pages is a cache bug which only affects local pages directly from disk (Opera always re-decodes images when loaded from disk). I'm sure it's something we can fix fairly easily, but in the meantime it's possible to try loading pages from a local web server instead as a workaround.

The second issue is Mozilla's Dromaeo JavaScript test, where Opera is disqualified because it's so far ahead of the rest. From what I can gather, we are not doing anything wrong there. The test apparently uses empty loops that don't produce any data, and Carakan simply optimizes that away.

Finally, the memory tests may not tell the full story. Opera will run fine on systems that are low on memory, but will also use more memory when available in order to increase performance. Since their test system has 4GB RAM, one would expect applications to take advantage of that. Opera runs on a wide range of devices, from mobile phones to high-end PCs, so it has been designed to adapt its memory usage to the environment.

Perhaps their next test could take a look at how the different browsers handle a larger selection of environments with different amounts of memory?

Time to fork WebKit

My wish for this year is for Google to fork WebKit. They should take the WebKit code, give it a new name, and create a separate browser engine based on that. This, I argue, would be in both Google's own interest, and in the interest of the open Web.

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Randall C. Kennedy at InfoWorld seems to think that Firefox is doomed.

Why is it doomed?

It isn't entirely clear to me, really. His argument seems to be that the delay of Firefox 3.6 shows that Mozilla is in chaos, and that their talk about restructing their development process means that they are in real trouble. That they can no longer maintain their product. Shorter release cycles apparently means that Firefox won't be tested much anymore, as they are bypassing the lengthy testing process and releasing numerous small changes without testing them (sufficiently) first, like Microsoft. And even Microsoft can't pull it off, he says.

I find his argument to be rather weak.

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According to Computerworld, security firm Cenzic has released a report showing that Firefox and Safari were the least secure browsers in the first half of 2009. That's the impression you get by simply skimming the article anyway. The actual report from Cenzic only counts the number of security flaws, and concludes that Firefox had 44% of all vulnerabilities, Safari had 35%, IE had 15%, and Opera a mere 6%.

Does that really mean that IE is more secure than Firefox and Safari?

I'm not sure a conclusion like that can be drawn at all. There are other aspects to security vulnerabilities that were not covered, such as the severity, and how long the vendor takes to fix them. Furthermore, security reports sometimes elevate standard crash bugs into security bugs, for example referring to them as "Denial of Service Vulnerabilities".

It's great to see that Opera has a low number of vulnerabilities, and I am confident that we would look good if severity and "time to fix" were taken into account as well. But until the report actually includes those relevant details, it isn't really that useful.

Statistics are great, though. You can make them show just about anything.

In an article triggered by RIM's acquisition of Torch Mobile and their WebKit based browser, CNET's Matt Asay argues that Apple has too much control over WebKit. Other companies relying on WebKit for their browser will basically be slaves to Apple's release cycles, and Apple will always control where WebKit is heading and optimize it for their own products.

So what is his solution to this suggested problem?

it would be nice to see a truly open-source project--open in source, and open to outside involvement--standardize the mobile browsing experience, too

In other words, he is echoing Symbian's call for a standardized browser for all mobile phones.

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Netscape founder Marc Andreessen is apparently backing a new browser called "RockMelt". Details are sketchy at the moment, but rumours have it that it's a browser tailored for Facebook.

I hope the rumours are untrue.

What I am hoping for is that RockMelt will be a Web browser which is not tied to any specific sites, and that it will introduce a completely new browser engine. Writing a browser engine is a huge undertaking, but we need more of them on the market.

The larger the number of widely used browser engines is, the lower the impact of security holes in any single browser, the more expensive and time-consuming it will be for virus and malware authors to infect computers, and the higher the benefits are for writing standards-compliant Web pages.

One of the comments on the antitrust complaint against Microsoft I see a lot is: "So what if most people are using IE and aren't aware that there are choices? I'm using Opera/Firefox/Chrome just fine."

Sometimes we may feel that something doesn't really affect us. But does IE's dominance on the Web affect us even though it might not feel that way?

The answer is: Yes, definitely. But the problems with a monoculture on the Web extends beyond browsers! A single point of failure is a bad thing no matter what.

Browser monoculture

The recent ActiveX security flaws in IE once again show us that a browser monoculture is a bad thing because those looking to infect people's computers will have a single target with a very nice return of investment. And those millions of compromised computers can be used for things like sending spam to the rest of us.

But it goes much further than just IE. One could argue that just about any kind of dominance of the Web is a bad thing.

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We are all used to all the artificial JavaScript benchmarks out there by now. What they have in common is that they all test small parts of JavaScript, and none of them are testing real-life performance.

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Performance benchmarks are all the rage these days, but everyone seems to be focusing narrowly on artificial benchmarks that basically tell you how certain browsers perform at the particular JavaScript functions chosen for those particular benchmarks.

It's surprising that there is little or no focus on other, perhaps more relevant performance aspects of modern pages. For example, how do browsers perform when it comes to dynamically changing the style of a page (CSS)?

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