seanmonstar

Asa Dotzler:

On ARM chips, Microsoft gives IE access special APIs absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won’t give to other browsers so there’s no way another browser can possibly compete with IE in terms of features or performance.

This is huge. It’s not that it’s difficult to make a Metro-style app. It’s that some core underlying APIs that users take for granted aren’t available. An easy one to notice: Firefox on ARM won’t be able to dynamically load and execute generated code; commonly known as JIT compilation. JIT compilation of JavaScript is how all modern browsers are able to make JavaScript run so quickly. Users will certainly notice that Firefox seems slow, and think it’s all Mozilla’s fault.

Then, John Gruber points this out:

In other words, Microsoft is setting policies for Windows for ARM that are a lot like Apple’s policies for iOS. These policies and restrictions make just as much sense for Microsoft as they do for Apple.

I can never understand people who have the mind of “that’s fine, it’s better for the parent company.” It’s also worse for the user. The policy that Apple has for the iOS store is just as bonkers.

Brendan Eich of Mozilla:

What I do know for certain is this: H.264 is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile.

I can’t say I care too much about the non-openness of H.264, but I’m glad Mozilla does. The only thing allowing movie producers to use H.264 encoding is a “promise” that the owner of the technology won’t charge them. If it ever goes away, and all those people get charged for using H.264, I won’t have to pay directly, but the Internet will suffer as producers scramble to do something about it. That means I will be affected anyways.

Still, everyone else thinks it’s better to just move forward with H.264 because there’s already hardware that supports it.¹ Mozilla is the only one that has stood against it, and now, all Firefox users get video through Flash, instead of the native HTML5 video element like the rest of the Internet.

The goal is to allow H.264 to play, but to continue to fight for a better technology as well.

A Firefox add-on by Mozilla that helps visualize sites that track you with cookies. As you visit sites, it will build a graph, so you can see which websites are following your path across the internet.

I upgraded my Galaxy S to an Ice Cream Sandwich ROM just to try out Chrome for Android. I had also made some statements about how it must be better than Firefox for Android, before knowing better.

Now, having used it for the past 3 weeks, Chrome for Android is terrible. It’s startup time is unbearable, often taking 15-30 seconds. Even simply the “New Tab” page takes way too long to load. Rendering pages is incredibly slow, and often the “App Not Responding” message shows up. It’s even crashed my phone.

The up side, though, is that Firefox for Android saw some speed improvements with my switch to ICS. It now loads fairly quickly, opening to a new page in ~5 seconds.

The tab card-like interaction on Chrome for Android is still far more fun, though (if you can wait for it to load).

Exciting news for Android. It’s always been a wonder why the stock Browser wasn’t Chrome, and now it is. And it really rocks. The tab interface is fun to use.

However, since it uses an updated version of the webkit rendering engine, it should need to load that library upon initialization. The standard engine is always in memory, something that’s held back Firefox for Android. Yet, Chrome doesn’t seem to suffer from this.

Perhaps the mobile Firefox engineers already know, but I can think of 3 possibilities:

• There’s a way to keep the new libraries in memory.
• There’s a way to replace the default engine
• Or they just handle the loading in a better way.

Whichever it is, hopefully mobile Firefox can find a way to improve their loading to be close to equivalent to Chrome’s loading.

I was slowly working on an add-on to block social buttons on websites, but I recently just found Ghostery. They have an extension for Chrome and Firefox, and it rocks.

When people ask me why they should use Chrome or Firefox, I tell them that feature-wise they’re pretty competitive. This sums up the difference greatly:

This is a Google product and it has to benefit Google. It isn’t merely about making the web better, it is also about promoting Google products and giving them an advantage over competing services. […] Even if it requires violating your privacy.

Firefox wants the web to be better, and Chrome wants Google to be better.

Henrik Eneroth shows his ideas of how the browser UI could look, now that we all have widescreens. It’s beautiful.

I personally love how the “Tab Groups” work, and think Firefox could at least follow suit with regards to remembering my groups, dangit! With Firefox, I only ever set up some groups if I know I will be leaving Firefox open for a week or so. Otherwise, whatever.