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Web browsers rev up to race

Radical changes are coming with regard to both the look and feel and the internal architecture of the popular Web browsers. By Prashant L Rao

Back in the day, Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator fought a death match that IE won with its fifth iteration. Today we are seeing yet another struggle for supremacy on the Web. Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s browser, remains the market leader but over the past twelve months or so, it has steadily lost market share to Firefox, the browser that rose from the ashes of Netscape Navigator. According to Net Applications, IE had a market share of 71.52% during the month of September 2008, followed by Firefox with 19.46% and Safari with 6.65%. Chrome had about 0.78% down a bit from its peak of 1% soon after its launch. Safari’s success is largely due to the revival of Apple’s popularity on the desktop in the US (interestingly the iPhone does not seem to have much of market share as a browsing platform. Only 0.32% of the browsing population was using one).

Google Chrome is the wild card in the Web browser mart. It has received more hype than its market share warrants. Nevertheless, it has set the ball rolling for radical revisions of the plumbing that makes your browser work. While the IE8 team has been working on running each tab in its own process while loading a fresh site, Chrome has put the spotlight squarely on having one process per tab. Similarly, while Firefox 3 optimized JavaScript and sped up AJAX heavy sites such as Gmail, Chrome’s V8 engine has made JavaScript, which at one point was in danger of being marginalized by Flash and its competitors, a top priority for all browser makers.

Let us look at the changes that are taking place in browser architecture and why they matter.

Changes under the hood

• A process for every tab: That sounds like a political slogan but it is not. Basically, multi-process architectures have historically belong in operating systems where every program runs in its own process (I am simplifying here; programs may spawn more than one process but let us keep it simple). Now we have two browsers, Chrome and IE8, both of which run each tab in its own process (IE8 may run more than one tab from the same Web site in a common process but for every fresh site loaded it creates a new process. The chrome—the components of a Web browser window including the frames, menus, toolbars and scroll bars—of IE8 runs as a separate process. There is even a sandbox in which plugins run so that when a crashed tab is restored the offending plugin is disabled).

  The good thing about running each tab in its own process is that if one tab crashes, something which happens every now and then mostly because of badly written plugins, then the rest of your browsing session remains intact. In the past, Firefox had attempted to solve this problem by reloading all your open tabs when the browser was restarted after a crash, but the one process/tab architecture is a better solution to this problem.

• JavaScript engines: JavaScript is a fundamental part of the Web. It has always been popular among Web developers looking to validate forms and add some interactivity but with the coming of AJAX and sites such as Gmail that match or beat desktop applications in their sophistication and usability, JavaScript’s role on the Web has become a vital one. That is why Google put so much emphasis on its V8 engine for Chrome that, although it hasn’t taken away massive amounts of market share from the leaders—IE and Firefox, has set the browser developer community abuzz. Firefox 3.1 will have a revamped JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey. Even the IE8 team has been working on optimizing JavaScript. A Microsoft spokesperson said, “We profiled a lot of sites and found that strings and regular expressions took the most time. There are substantial improvements in Beta2 compared to IE7.”

Web standards compliance
I ran the Acid3 test for Web standards on the browser betas and got the following results.
Browser	Acid3 score (out of 100)
Chromium 0.3.155.0	98
Firefox 3.1 pre-beta	89
Internet Explorer 8 beta 2	21
Chrome 0.2.149.30	79
Firefox 3.03	70
Internet Explorer 7	12
Apple Safari 3.1.2	75
To pass this test, a browser must render smooth animation and score 100/100 and the final page match the reference rendering provided (see above) pixel for pixel. The browser has to be run with its default settings for this test.

Beta roundup

We can expect some major releases of all three browsers by end 2008. IE 8 will be out by then. Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 should be out soon. The final version will probably be out early next year. Chrome, like many of Google’s offerings, is a perpetual beta. Right now, it is at 02.149.30 though there is a lot of activity on its Open Source sibling Chromium that is packaged by Google as Chrome.

• Internet Explorer 8 beta 2: Other than the under the hood improvements, IE8 also adds a lot of things to the stuff that you can see and use. Accelerators, Web slices etc (covered in my earlier preview of the browser’s beta 2) are nice as is inline search. The new SmartScreen filter is faster than the older Phishing filter that occasionally timed out while checking sites. SmartScreen does not recheck a site that has been vetted to be OK. While that improves performance, it is not the best thing to do from a security perspective as a site could be compromised after the initial check. However, it does fit in with Microsoft’s design philosophy of providing a balance between usability and stability/security. Another instance of this is the fact that IE8, unlike Chrome, does not run every tab in its own process. The upside of this is that IE8’s memory usage should be less than that of Chrome when the final version arrives.
• Firefox 3.1 pre-beta: Rather than download Alpha 2 that does not include TraceMonkey, I decided to throw caution to the winds and downloaded the latest nightly build of Firefox 3.1 which is labeled pre-beta and enabled TraceMonkey from the about:config dialog. Firefox nightly builds are called Minefield and despite the name, the pre-beta handled nicely and was quite zippy while browsing AJAX-heavy sites (Gmail, Zoho). Interface-wise there is not a lot of change. A slimmed down New Tab button is now flush right next to the dropdown list for viewing the names of open tabs.
• Chromium 0.3.155.0: This nightly build of Chromium is not all that different from Google Chrome’s current build as far as look and feel goes. In fact, you could put a Chrome user down in front of a computer with Chromium on it and he would not be able to tell the difference barring the program’s icon, which tends to shades of blue rather than the multicolored look that Google has chosen for Chrome. One nice thing about Chrome/Chromium is that Google really takes the broken site reports that are filed by users quite seriously. I reported a problem with accessing Lotus Domino 7 Webmail and, a few days later I was able to access the site without any problems.

I ran the Acid3 test for Web standards on all the betas as well as the existing versions of these three browsers and Chrome/Chromium topped the compatibility charts followed by Firefox 3.03/3.1 pre-beta. IE, both 7 and 8, fared poorly with IE8 scoring 21. All of which suggests that for all the noise made about standards, organizations and individuals do not seem to care overmuch about compliance. For if they did, IE would not be the market leader. Factors such as ease-of-deployment and OS integration seem to count for more than standards. Even in terms of speed, both Firefox and Chrome seem to be pulling away from IE8, which, while it is faster than its predecessor, is still no speed demon.

What is likely is that IE’s numbers will continue to erode but at some point, this erosion will stop largely because the corporate world will not move to Firefox unless the Mozilla organization comes out with a usable deployment kit for IT managers. There is a third-party option for companies wishing to deploy Firefox company-wide. It is from a company called FrontMotion. However, the MSI builds offered by this company are a couple of versions behind what can be downloaded from Mozilla’s site. Chrome has to get out of beta if it is to attain critical mass.

For now, Microsoft seems safe for even if Mozilla came out with a deployment kit for Firefox, most intranet sites would continue to comply with IE6/7’s non-standard rendering making it a Herculean task for IT staff to port their templates and Web-based applications to run on standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox or Chrome. The W3C’s delay in framing Web standards seems to have resulted in the Web developer community embracing IE6/7 as de facto standards. Therefore, on the corporate front, it seems that IE will continue to prevail.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com