It’s amazing how the web has been ignited again in the name of the best JavaScript engine and browser layout engine. Everywhere I turn, there is talk of Ajax, JavaScript frameworks etc. The web has entered another phase; were application are heavily rendered on the client-side instead of the server-side; hence; the need for better JavaScript and rendering engines. The cloud is everywhere and people want to access it from many different devices. The browser war has even made its way to the mobile platform with contenders like Mobile IE, Safari, Opera etc. All these exciting work comes with the duty to support if not all, the major browsers in our applications. There are lots of browsers but I will concentrate on the major ones in this post. With that said, Let introduce our contenting fellows.
Meet Mater (alias Internet Explore)
Take your time to absorb his looks. Not handsome but has been around the block for a long time. Internet Explore 1.0 debuted in 1995 to facilitate the growing hunger of the mass to access the world wide web. The use-to-be-great Netscape battled it out with IE till around 1999. IE won hands down not because of Microsoft strategy to include IE in its OS, but because IE stayed on the edge and was the only browser at that time to support a large part of of W3C Dom and CSS standards. After its success over Netscape, Internet Explorer basically stood still from 1999 to 2003 with not much activities except for the usual patches and updates here and there. It was the kingpin of Browser Spring till 2003 when Apple rebelled with Safari. By then most users were sick and tired of the old IE, for nothing had happened to it in a period of 3 years.
Meet Lightning McQueen ( Firefox )
Catchewwww, yep, that’s the sound of spend and beauty. It’s lightning mcqueen zipping through browser spring. First released on November 9th 2004, Firefox was the resurrection/rebirth of Netscape but engineered without all the mistakes made by its predecessor. It packed the goody’s on W3C Dom and CSS standards. Better yet, it was free; not like its father, Netscape. The Netscape/Mozilla team had learnt their lesson and had created a monster, formidable to stand toe to toe with IE. Firefox 2.0 push the game much further, introducing great features such as tab browsing which has now become the standard to most browsers and the extension manager, which by far; has become the most used feature set of Firefox. Firefox boost of both rendering speed (using Gecko) as well as JavaScript execution speed. It made it’s mark, and is hear to stay.
Meet Sally (Google Chrome)
Fed up with the timeline it takes to release new standards by W3C to support the modern use of browsers, Google decide to spit out Sally with her V8 cafe. V8(Chromes JavaScript engine) and Chrome have been touted as the fastest browser and JavaScript engine as of early 2008 (inception of chrome). Chrome took a different route with JavaScript by building its engine to compile JavaScript to native machine code making it fast. My first impression with Chrome was that of –“here goes another browser for developers to worry about”. Well, I will have to say, I have been very impressed with chrome and look forward to more in the future. After all, Google’s cash making machine primarily comes from search and it’s web apps. Thus, the better the browser,the better their applications’ performance.
Meet iHudson (Safari)
Safari was developed by Apple in 2003, to ship with their flagship OS X 10. Apple boasted that Safari was the fasters browser there was but there had actually been no proof. In 2007, a windows version was released, becoming the second Apple product to trend on Microsoft territory after iTunes. Team Safari just announced a couple of months ago, their new JavaScript engine named SquirrelFish; to be the fastest JavaScript engine at present beating Google chrome’s V8. Sally must not be pleased.
Javascript Benchmarks
On same computer, an average of 10 test run on each browser
Browsers
|
V8 Benchmark Suite-v1 | Sunspider Javascript Benchmark |
| Internet Explorer 8 beta | 70 | 7890.8ms +/- 1.3% |
| Safari (Windows) 3.0 | 71 | browse froze everytime |
| Firefox 3.0 | 231 |
3361.6ms +/- 1.5% |
| Google Chrome 1.0 | 3200 |
1250.4ms +/- 8.8% |
War in Browser Spring
Its amazing how all these enhancement to the web has suddenly sprung up. Every browser has to stay on the edge just to be competitive. I, for one, I’m no one to complain. Competition breads the best in everything. In the end, the end user benefits. As a developer for the web (sometimes), I’m pleased to see such excitement. IE has itself to blame; for it stayed in dormant state for way to long. Microsoft has the tendency to do that. They lack innovation in some area and I fear the browser is one of them. I could be wrong with IE 8. MS is slated to release IE 8 sometime next year which is suppose to be more standard compliant and supports CSS 2.1.
Who do you think will be kingpin? Let me know your thoughts.
Filed under: Ajax, Javascript, Platforms, RIA, Scripting
