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Posts Tagged ‘Browser Wars’

Internet Explorer 8 Takes the Top Spot… Or Does It?

Internet Explorer 8 has regained the top spot in the never-ending browser battle today, or so says the Guardian, citing statistics from Net Applications. According to the statistics, IE 8 has taken a 5% lead over Firefox 3.5, but this is not only unsurprising, but likely temporary.

We also have some numbers from StatCounter that show the race to be much closer than Net Applications would have you believe.

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According to the Guardian article, “the decade-old IE6 had a transitory spot at the top of the chart because of IE7 users switching to IE8,” but now IE8 has finally taken the lead from IE 6 because of the decline of Windows XP. We have to assume that there are a number of other reasons at play. According to Net Applications, IE 8 leads all browser versions with 22% of the market, IE 6 comes in second with 20% and Firefox 3.5 comes in with 17%.

StatCounter, on the other hand, shows IE 8 and Firefox 3.5 in a virtual tie, with 21% each, and IE 7 coming next with 19%.

In December, we reported that Firefox 3.5 had overtaken all versions of Internet Explorer for the top spot, but that was only looking at statistics from StatCounter. We’re inclined to believe the StatCounter numbers over the Net Applications numbers for a few reasons. Take a look at the StatCounter graph of the same period.

A lot has happened in the browser wars since we declared Firefox 3.5 the number one browser version. When word hit that Internet Explorer was at fault for the Google hacks in China, both France and Germany recommended that their citizens switch browsers. This caused a large number of people to flee Internet Explorer and adopt other browsers, such as Firefox, in its place. At the same time, Firefox finished multiple rounds of release candidates before finally releasing Firefox 3.6. This release caused a lot of people to stop using Firefox 3.5 and switch to the newer version, causing the numbers for 3.5 to drop slightly.

While we can see these drops in the graph provided by StatCounter, the Net Applications graph shows a steady climb for IE 8. We find ourselves unable to declare a current leader in the never-ending war of browsers superiority, and, in all honesty, think it would be futile do so at this moment in time. With new versions and public relations battles over security, everything is shifting and we think it will be a while before any browser clearly pulls ahead.

That said, it won’t stop us from taking a look the next time the numbers change.

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Best BigCo of 2009

In one of ReadWriteWeb’s longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we’re announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we’ll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company.

In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006 and 2004, and Yahoo! in 2005. Who will be Best BigCo of 2009? Will Apple be the first company to win it two years running? Will Google win the honor for a 3rd year? How about Facebook, which grew significantly this year. Let’s find out…

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Best BigCo of 2009

The ReadWriteWeb team has chosen Google as our Best BigCo of 2009! Google last won it in 2006 and this is the third time we’ve honored the Mountain View company.

Google is without question the predominant Internet company of our time; in large part because it continues to innovate and stay one step ahead of its competition.

In our Top 100 products list for 2009, seven Google products made the cut:

• Android platform
• Google App Engine
• Google Apps
• Google Chrome
• Google Maps
• Google Search Options and Rich Snippets
• Google Voice

And we didn’t even include Google Wave, its biggest launch of the year. We think Wave has a lot of potential, but it’s clearly at the experimental stage still.

The web browser Chrome was probably the Google product that had the biggest impact this year. Launched in late 2008, Chrome still only holds a small share of the browser market and doesn’t offer a stable version for OSX or Linux yet, however it has already changed the browser market. As we wrote in our Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 review, Chrome’s relentless focus on speed helped to reignite the browser wars and is changing the way developers and Google’s competitors think about browsers.

Chrome is also the basis for Google’s upcoming Chrome OS, designed for netbooks – a growing fad in computers. So expect to see a lot more of Chrome in 2010.

Runners-Up: Apple, Facebook

It’s been another good year for Apple and its iPhone platform. The iPhone is the leading smartphone in the market and the App Store now features over 100,000 applications. This year, as we mentioned in our Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009 review, Apple extended the SDK with version 3.0 of the iPhone OS. The updates included better support for 3D gaming, augmented reality apps, easier access to maps, in-app purchases and support for push notifications.

With these kinds of improvements, we expect Apple to continue its success on the Mobile Web in 2010 – despite increasing competition from Google’s Android platform.

Facebook had a stellar year too, passing the 300 million active user mark in September. It also continued to add features to the site, ranging from vanity URLs to a new sharing widget and a focus on real-time updates of its users news streams.

Facebook’s user base is increasingly diverse and it is now clearly the number 1 social network in the world, leaving MySpace in its dust. What’s more, Facebook’s user base is now bigger than the population of all but three countries in the world.

Next Page: Honorable Mentions & Also Rans

Hardware Acceleration: The Next Frontier in the Browser Wars

Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 9 at its Professional Developers Conference earlier this month. One of the unique features of IE9 that Microsoft announced at that time was hardware acceleration for its browser. Thanks to technologies like Direct2D and Direct Write that are available for Windows7, Windows developers can use a computer’s graphics card to render websites faster. While Microsoft is still working on this project behind closed doors, however, you can already download a Direct2D-enabled pre-release version of Firefox 3.7 today.

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Beyond JavaScript: Fast Browsers Thanks to Direct2D

Ever since the release of Google’s Chrome, browser developers have emphasized JavaScript performance. There is still a lot of work left to be done in this area, but developers have also started to investigate other parts of the browser that could benefit from new technologies.

According to Firefox developer Bas Schouten, the current implementation of Direct2D in this pre-release version will work best with graphics cards that support DirectX10 and WDDM1.0 drivers. On systems that fulfill these specs, though, users are likely to see significantly better performance on graphics-heavy sites. Sites that mostly render static text or depend on Adobe Flash to display their graphics won’t benefit greatly from Direct2D. One benefit of Direct2D that users will notice on most sites, however, is improved font rendering.

For the time being, this is just an experiment and it isn’t clear if Mozilla will integrate this technology into Firefox 3.7. What is clear, is that Mozilla seems to be ahead of Microsoft and by doing its development out in the open and through open source, Mozilla will be able to rely on its vast developer community to test and enhance these features.

What About Google and Apple?

Some would argue that the release of Google Chrome started this new race towards faster browsers, and as CNet’s Stephen Shankland pointed out earlier today, the Chrome development team is quite aware of Mozilla’s efforts and investigating the use of hardware acceleration in Chrome as well. As Shankland also notes, these Direct2D efforts shouldn’t be confused with other projects like WebGL or Google’s Native Client. Direct2D-enabled browsers will be able to render current pages faster, while these other technologies will require developers to redesign their sites.

Currently, a lot of these experiments are mostly focused on Windows. With OpenCL in Snow Leopard, Apple already offers a programming interface for using graphics cards for general-purpose computing. Apple is probably also looking at OpenCL to speed up Safari, though we aren’t aware of any projects from Mozilla or Google that are making use of OpenCL at this point.

Get it Now

If you feel like experimenting with a new browser, you can download an early pre-release of an alpha version of Firefox 3.7 here. While we have tested this browser for a while and didn’t see any crashes, it is worth remembering that this version isn’t meant to be run in a production environment and that most of your extensions will likely not work.

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Internet Explorer 9 to sport GPU acceleration and HTML5 support

Even if you don’t have a favored fighter in the browser wars, you have to admit Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been looking mighty unfit over the last few years. Younger and fitter contenders like Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome have arguably overtaken the old stalwart, and now Microsoft is making some much-needed noise about fighting back. The software giant has been giving developers and curious journalists a very early peek into its IE 9 progress at PDC, with its stated ambitions including faster Javascript (see table above), HTML5 support, and hardware acceleration for web content. By harnessing DirectX and your graphics processor, the new browser will offer improvements in text readability and video performance, as well as taking some of the load off the CPU. Development has only just got under way, mind you, so there’s still plenty of time to screw it all up. Or make it awesome.

Internet Explorer 9 to sport GPU acceleration and HTML5 support originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wikitude Launches User Generated Augmented Reality Browser for Android Users, iPhone Soon

Austrain augmented reality startup Wikitude announced today that it has released the 3.0 version of its software for Android handsets, fully integrating its OpenID-enabled wiki markup of physical locations around the world with a more sophisticated mobile user experience and preparing for the launch of its iPhone version. Unfortunately the company’s content adding site, Wikitude.me, appears to have crashed already.

Wikitude is one of the most high-profile augmented reality services on the market. It’s a market that’s fast growing crowded and everyone wants to know if interoperability will be a priority or if we’re looking at the next browser wars.

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Wikitude competes with the more commercially oriented service Layar and an unlaunched brand-centric AR iPhone browser from AcrossAir. Japanese AR firm Tochnidot says it will launch an app similar to Wikitude soon. Will these services become interoperable so users of one AR browser can see the content created on the other systems? That’s the key question.

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology paradigm that puts layers of data on top of a user’s view of the real physical world around them. After years in the labs, AR development is heating up fast this summer. Several AR apps are available for Android and numerous companies are waiting for the next version of the iPhone OS to be released this Fall with support for location (if not marker-based) augmented reality.

Last week what looks like the first AR app to do so snuck into the iPhone app store, yesterday a red hot app for road conditions in major US cities made an appearance and now Wikitude quietly let AR bloggers know today about its new release.

Wikitude’s application appears to be more user-centric than its competitors. By enabling content creators to add points of interest by simply logging in with their Google, Twitter, Yahoo or OpenID accounts there will be a lower barrier to entry than there is to creating a Wikipedia entry for a location with proper location markup that can be viewed through other AR browsers.

Hopefully, just like with desktop and other mobile browsers, we’ll be able to see all the AR content someday through any AR browser. Probably the market leader right now, Layar told us this week that interoperability is something they are big proponents of, though they haven’t done any legal work in that direction yet and seemed to us most interested in their own technology becoming the agreed-upon standard.

Interoperability is a technical, business and legal challenge that’s much easier said than done. That work is being done by data portability, identity and open web advocates on the web at large, but augmented reality appears set to be the new way that people around the world view a web of data. We’ll be watching eagerly for movement towards a single AR web that browser providers compete on by trying to offer the best user experience.

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