browsers – Page 2 – The Page Not Found Blog

Browser updates…too many too fast?

We’ve finally reached the point where the number of browser updates is out of control. There’s an all-out war between the various browser companies to see who can push out the most updates and improvements in the shortest period of time.

All these updates are causing a ripple effect on everything else that is dependent on the browser; for example, plug-in vendors, IT support staff, computer and smart phone vendors, application developers, any company that has a website, and your average consumer. I’m guessing that on average the pace of updates is starting to outpacing business and consumer’s ability to keep up…and it seems to be accelerating.

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree we benefit from the advancements. No argument there. However that is balanced by reality. And, reality is architecting our products to support the latest and greatest. There is also the fact that most of us also have to maintain support for older versions of browsers and there is a cost associated with backward compatibility. And, there is a cost to upgrading. Not everyone is able to update all the time.

As a case in point, let’s take a look at Firefox since it’s fairly easy to find an archive of their older releases. We are only seven months into the year 2011 and Firefox has had two major releases: Firefox 4 and Firefox 5. However, if you include releases candidates, betas and updates to Firefox 3.x the total number climbs to around twenty-two releases so far this year. Yikes!

Sure, most consumers only saw the two major updates: Firefox 4 and Firefox 5. But, they also experience a plethora of plug-in updates. For example, Flash Player has had eight updates so far this year. Silverlight has had three general distribution releases this year and one beta release of Silverlight 5. And, I wasn’t counting but it seems like I’ve had a bunch of Adobe Reader updates in the last few months.

My concern is that the speed of browser innovation is starting to cause businesses and consumers to get fatigued. It begs the question: how long can the ecosystem of browser consumers maintain this pace? Or, at what point do people just start jumping off the bandwagon and simply starting skipping releases? Do most consumers really care if their browser is now 100ms faster in parsing JavaScript? How many new ways can we create tabs?

In summary, I think browser vendors should slow down and become better custodians of their systems. How about also focusing on innovation in security, memory leaks and best practices documentation and vendor-provided validation engines? Indeed, they have sparked tremendous innovation across the entire world wide web since Mosaic released in 1993. But, depending on how many websites you visit, you can still experience slow web pages, in-consistent cross-browser support and browser crashes. I know there are no easy answers because competition breeds creativity. Perhaps we’ll all go back to just looking at basic text, pictures and videos in the future. And, there will just be specific widgets with very focused functionality for other things.

References:

Flash Player Archive

Firefox Archive

Silverlight Release History

Improving Browser performance and stability – will web workers help?

The single-threaded nature of JavaScript is an old tradition that needs to go away. It was great in the wild-west, internet days of the 20^th century. But, today we have more complex needs that are being driven by the advancements that are happening around good old JavaScript as we know it, such as…on-going advancements in HTML 5.

The reason I bring this up is because I’ve been watching the discussion on Web Workers as it has evolved. It’s a brave attempt to bring a standard for implementing some sanity on this ancient notion of single threading. Now, I do want to say that this post isn’t about debating the merits of web workers, per se. It’s about giving developers better tools on which to build web applications for end users. I’ll be the first to agree that many developers (but not all!), for a variety of reasons, build apps like factories, but without many quality checks.

One argument the pro-single threaded parties claim is that doing away with single-threading will make things even more complicated for the companies that develop browsers and the developers that build apps on them. And, in effect, you’d be giving them (web app developers) free license to create even more terribly built web pages that crash browsers. For brevity sake, I’m only picking this one out of many possible arguments, as the one that comes up most often in discussions.

I also don’t ever recall seeing a browser vendor themselves saying something like this publicly, but it’s possible. This is a very weak argument that won’t stand the test of time. Sure, as we build more complex apps then there will be more of both good and bad apps. That’s just the way things work. There’s no way we would ever have a single authority that reviews all web apps before they are published. Perhaps, similar to what Apple does with iPhone apps. Not only would it be impractical, but it certainly seems like it goes against the spirit of the internet and WWW.

I fall into the camp of evolving the tools to better to fit the ever-changing and growing needs of the end users. End users don’t understand the limitations of the browser technology. They don’t need to and shouldn’t be expected to. All they know is that they want to see ever more visually stunning applications that run well and don’t crash all the time.

Developer tools and technology are much, much more advanced now than when the venerable Mosaic Web Browser hit the scene back in 1993. As an example, all eyes are on HTML 5 (more on that at a later date), and certainly we have the well-known browser plug-ins: Flash and Silverlight, and each has their own development kits. These technologies enable the building of some of the most eye-catching websites, and they really opened people’s eyes on what the web experience should be more like.

Now, I am eyes-wide-open about this. There are some well-documented, but not well understood existing limitations related to the web surfing/development experience as I blogged about here. But, merely saying things should not change because it will become too complicated isn’t a good enough reason to, well…not change. There are lots of smart people out there that love solving these types of problems.

So, I have a few suggestions of my own for the browser vendors and others to debate and work on. I think web workers are huge step in the right direction. But I also think there’s some other more strategic things that browser vendors could be doing that I think would also help. To me these are just as important as evolving the web standards, perhaps even more so. This is about browser vendors officially providing guidelines for us on how to do our job better:

Best Practices Document. All the major vendors should publish web development best practices for HTML and JavaScript development. And, I’m not talking about the W3C standard. That is what’s expect, but not actually what’s implemented. For example, I did a quick search of “web development best practices” using Google and Bing and the very first result I found was a short, not-really-so-helpful article on the Apple web site that was written in 2008!
Online HTML/JavaScript Validation engine(s). Each browser vendor should publish their own online HTML/JavaScript validation engine. Or better yet would be if someone builds one site that checks all major browsers in one shot and provides actionable feedback. I’m aware of other types of validators such as this one by W3C for HTML and the like. But, in general right now it’s just a hodgepodge of 3-rd party tools and guesswork as to whether a web app is working right. And, if you are like me and running the web debugger all the time, you’d know how many broken web pages there really are.

References:

Web Workers – Living Standard Document.

The browser as an operating system

Having a basic understanding of how our web applications affect browser performance is the key to determining whether the apps you build will be great, and which apps will be a miserable experience for your users. You can have the worlds’ best looking app with the nicest user-interface ever, but if it runs horribly on most visitors machines or phones then you’ve done your end users a massive disservice.

I contend that the browser as a web application programming environment should be treated as its own operating system with its own well defined dependencies. If you have a basic understanding of how these dependencies work, you’ll be able to build better, more stable, faster applications.

We are constrained in what we can build because browsers provide a finite environment in which to play in. To make things even more fun and challenging, in just the last five years we have gained access to some very powerful tools to build even more complex applications, such as Microsoft’s Silverlight API, and Adobe’s Flex/ActionScript API. Now we can build applications with very rich graphics in days or weeks that would have taken many months or even years before these tools became available. And, web applications until only recently gained the ability to semi-directly interact with the operating system to perform operations such as save or retrieve files from local hard drives. In the ‘dark ages’ we had to bounce files off a proxy server before being able to download them to the local machine. How we interact with the local machine is ultimately controlled by what the browser will allow.

The browser sandbox

Browsers provide us with a well-defined sandbox in which our apps can run, and from a developer’s perspective it includes the following:

A JavaScript engine
An HTML parser
User Interface rendering engine
Add-ins/Plug-ins (e.g. Flash Player, Silverlight, etc)
Cache space (includes cookies and local stores like in FlashPlayer)
Access to the internet
Access to local resources

It’s also important note, and if you’ve been building web apps for a while now you’ll know, that browser vendors don’t implement the various proposed standards exactly the same. For example, Internet Explorer may display a certain CSS tag different. Here’s an interesting comparison chart.

What about hardware?

I’m also not saying we don’t need to pay attention to the underlying operating system. In fact, we absolutely do need to pay attention to the following. However, we interact with them only indirectly, and because of that we tend to forget just how important they are:

CPU
Memory
Graphics card
Internet connection

Mobile devices are a great example. Mobile devices are getting more powerful all the time, but when they try and chug through a fully decked out web page, it takes them longer than a typical desktop or laptop. I’ve had developers tell me an app that’s running slow on everyone else’s machine was running just fine on theirs. What the developer forgot was he had the latest, greatest, hottest laptop out there with 8 GB’s of memory and an excellent internet connection! By way of example, I posted a screenshot at the bottom of this post of another website that even my quad-core laptop used between 50 – 80% of its resources to load the page.

Simple Tests

Here are some simple tests to tell if you web app is a good one that will meet the needs of your end users:

How much CPU does it consume? Test it on a moderately configured machine, typical of what your users might have.
How much memory does it use? And, how much memory over time? Browsers can be notoriously leaky, but your program may be contributing to it.
Is everything in the correct locations in the user interface at various common browser sizes? (e.g. 1024×768, 1280×800, etc.)
Does it cause temporary slowdowns or lockups?
Does it crash the browser or browser panel?
Does key functionality and layout work consistently across the major browsers?
Does your app work consistently across all the devices you wish to support, including mobile?

A Few References

Here are a few articles and websites for that are handy to have as references:

https://www.w3.org/

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Main_Page

https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cover.html#minitoc

https://taligarsiel.com/Projects/howbrowserswork1.htm

https://ejohn.org/blog/how-javascript-timers-work/

https://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/new-approach-to-browser-security-google.html

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefox-4-the-html5-parser-inline-svg-speed-and-more/