The Browser Platform Wars

I was chatting recently with the founder of a high-profile startup that is making strategic use of Mozilla technology. “People keep telling me that WebKit is the future,” he complained. “Have we made the wrong choice?” I did my best to reassure him of course, providing arguments that support their choice and pointing him to [...]

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 12, 2008

WebKit announces a new mailing list for reporting security vulnerabilities. Deb Richardson elucidates the new Firefox site identification button. Besides the practical merit of this feature, it is a fascinating study in communicating potentially confusing information to end users. Dion Almaer with a hack to duplicate the way Firefox lets you jump to a tab [...]

Apple's Safari Push is Not About the Money

Apple has been causing a stir with its heavy-handed tactics for pushing Safari onto Windows users. Those who have iTunes, whether or not they have ever installed Safari, are apparently getting an automatic update dialog proposing to “upgrade” to the latest versions of both products. Reactions range from that of Mozilla CEO John Lilly, who [...]

The Mozilla/WebKit Arms Race

Biologists talk about a phenomenon called the evolutionary arms race. Cheetahs, for example, only survived if they were fast enough to catch the slowest gazelles. Gazelles, on the other hand, only lived to produce offspring if they could outrun the fastest predators. These are powerful evolutionary forces, and as a result both species have adapted [...]

Browsers and Commoditization

Vladimir Vukićević of Mozilla made waves yesterday with the discovery that Apple’s Webkit (the engine that powers the Safari browser) uses undocumented OS X features that are not available to other browsers running on the Macintosh. This is unlikely to point to a simmering conspiracy on the part of Apple, though it does illustrate clearly [...]

Apple Edges Towards RIA Viability

MacRumors is reporting that Apple has shipped a new Safari beta to developers with a number of HTML5 features: audio/video tags, SQL storage, downloadable fonts, CSS transforms/animations and a new DOM function (getElementsByClassName). This puts Apple in pole position among browser vendors with respect to HTML5 support, although Mozilla is hot on its heels with [...]

Mobile Devices and the Browser Wars

Michael Calore of Wired delved more deeply into the Opera video that I mentioned yesterday. In particular, he took the logical step of contacting Opera PR to ask about David Rosen’s off-the-cuff assertion that they are planning an iPhone port. Opera communications honcho Michelle Valdivia Lien’s response is a PR classic: This is one of [...]

Browser Trends: Offline Storage

I’ll start my exploration of the future of web browser technology by discussing some key trends that will come to the fore in 2008. The first is the addition of local storage capabilities to web browsers. This is an area that kicked into high gear last year with Mozilla’s work on offline apps, Google Gears [...]