Mozilla is reported to be feeling the pinch from the opposition and wants to make its Firefoxbrowser a leaner, meaner runtime environment tool, rather than a simple web rendering device. Ben Galbraith, co-director of developer tools at Mozilla, says that browsers are evolving from page rendering applications into application runtime environments and need to be able to recreate many of the functions of operating systems. No argument from me, but I think I can hear the sound of grinding teeth from Redmond.
The spring board for this, has to be Google'a "Chrome" something which Mozilla acknowledges despite the fact that Chrome is a serious rival for the affections of the user and its business model needs to see people using the embedded Google search engine.
In the past five years or so, Firefox has been ahead of the pack but lost ground rapidly to Chrome, Safari and even IE8. It continues to rely on outdated programming which can lead to memory problems and it exacerbated with badly coded addons. It remains more feature rich, but a year or so down the line could be behind the competition, especially where user value speed.
Galbraith says he wants to have a group which will look at the way memory is used in Firefox. "We plan on the initial implementation of this tool to be simple. For memory usage, we want to introduce the ability to visualize the current set of non-collectible JavaScript objects at any point in time (i.e., the heap) and give you the ability to understand why those objects aren't collectible (i.e., trace any object to a GC root). For the cycle collector, we want to give you a way to understand when a collection starts and when it finishes and thus understand how long it took."
Firefox had 21.77% of the market earlier this year and remains the most customisable browser in the collection. But with efficient memory usage the future of the fox could be in doubt.
Whats the best browser? Its not the easiest question to answer, but have a look at some of the notes below before you decide on your weapon of choice.
for surfing the net. Each will act as your window on the web, with support Google Chrome is minimalistic. It aims for simplicity, and the interface is stripped down to bare essentials. A single text field (dubbed the “Omnibar”) acts as both address bar and search bar, and tabs protrude into the title bar to save space.
The middle ground is occupied by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.1. Outwardly, both browsers offer sober front-ends though IE8 does support some interesting new technologies. Safari 4, is a veritable orchestrate of whistles and bells.
Safari has two distinctive features. The first is the “top sites” view. When you open top sites, you’ll see a shiny curved grid of clicka
ble thumbnails enabling you to jump straight to a particular website. Safari watches your browsing habits and populates the grid with your most commonly visited sites. Safari’s other feature is its history view Safari also gives you a visual thumbnail of each page, making it easy to spot the site you seek even if you don’t recall its title.
Firefox 3.1 seems almost austere. The newer version offers a new plug-in manager to make it easier to manage Firefox extensions. Firefox's approach has always been to keep the main browser relatively conservative and offer a versatile plug-in architecture to enable third parties to add extra features and visual themes - and there are hundreds of free extensions available ranging from simple file viewers to advanced networking tools and interface tweakers.
Google prefers to trickle out incremental updates, typically upgrading the software every few weeks without even alerting the user. But the main features that set Chrome apart are the Omnibar and the “most visited” view, though rendered more plainly and without the configuration options.
The last contender, Internet Explorer 8 introduces some interesting new ideas: web accelerators let you send text or a link from one page directly to another web service enabling you, for example, to search, define or translate a word at the click of a button. IE8 also features a new mode called InPrivate, which enables you to send out a minimum of personal information while browsing, and to cache a minimum of received content to your hard disk.
Chrome: at its launch, it was able to render pages with unprecedented speed. And, more importantly, its JavaScript engine (known as V8) was much faster than any other browser’s, enabling web applications to become more powerful. It remains a fast browser, but today it no longer enjoys pole position: Firefox 3.1 uses an updated rendering engine and an all-new JavaScript engine, the curiously-named TraceMonkey. IE8 is a long way behind the rest of the pack on speed, so feature-rich sites likely to feel less snappy and responsive.
RAM usage, especially if you’re choosing a browser for use on a low-powered system such as a netbook is a big consideration. Firefox used to be a notorious memory hog, but the current version is impressively efficient. Chrome and IE8 make much greater demands. Safari is not a browser for a lightweight PC and is very RAM heavy in use.
Safari : FOR: Combines superfast performance with head-turning visual effects. AGAINST: Heavy on memory, and some may find the graphics irritatingly showy.
Chrome : FOR: A lightweight, simple and stable browser that just keeps getting better. AGAINST: Neither the fastest nor the best-featured option.
Firefox : FOR: Hugely extensible, with a low RAM footprint and great performance. AGAINST: Rather light on features until you mess around with third-party plug-ins.
Internet Explorer 8 : FOR: Brings some genuinely promising new technologies to the table. AGAINST : The slowest browser for JavaScript by a large margin.
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