Thanks Firefox for not opening 43,648 new windows!

Sometime we take certain things for granted. Certain things like Pop-up blockers that makes your online experiences much more pleasant. But if you want to be pedantic about it, we should thank Opera for being the first browser (among other firsts) to implement Pop-up blockers.

Firefox 4 will be the biggest release in its history in terms of the amount of changes coming to the most widely used open-source software and the second most popular browser. A lot of these changes are a long time coming and Mozilla has received some flack in recent times for not being able to keep up with the pace of changes in performances and features already available in much lesser used browsers. Some even went as far as calling Firefox the new IE with its constant stability issues and lack of major updates.

Lets look at some of the exciting changes coming to Firefox 4, which is expected to be released by the end of this year. Some of these changes are already available on Minefield nightlies.

1) Major UI Redesign:

If you look at the new Firefox 4 UI you might confuse it with Chrome design, since the tabs are now on top. But to be precise the new Firefox design looks less like Chrome and more like Opera 10. Alas Opera never gets credit for design and feature ideas, which is likely where chrome found their design inspiration and Firefox 4 followed.

Firefox Minefield on top, Opera 10 at bottom.

Mozilla is moving cautiously with this new design choice and they started to promote the new tab on top choice. But rest assured, its not a question of if they will do it. The decision has been made already they are just promoting the idea to make sure that the majority are kosher with the idea. As far as the new menu bar is concerned, it may stay there by default but you will have a choice to go back to the old format.

Another design concept they took from Chrome is the Sticky Tab concept where you will be able to leave your most widely used website in the form of a permanent tab/button on one corner. You could do this with Firefox extensions, but now it will be a permanent feature with Firefox 4.

2) JägerMonkey JavaScript Engine:

Its amazing how fast things changes in such short time. In less than a year ago Firefox was proud of having one of the fastest JavaScript Engine out there and Opera, IE had one of the worst performing JavaScript engines. Fast forward now, Opera has the fastest JavaScript engine as far as stable releases are concerned and even IE9 preview is beating Firefox in JS performance but a long shot.

Firefox currently uses nanojit for its native code generator and will be moving to Webkit’s JSCore engine for Firefox 4. Which combined with Tracemonkey’s powerful optimization should give them a better performance over their current engine. However it will be interesting to see how or if they will ever get faster than other webkit engine as far as JavaScript performance is concerned, since their implementation will be based on webkit.

3) New add-on manager:

Firefox 4 will be featuring a new add-on manager which will work on the background to update extensions instead of all the annoying pop-ups on every startup or every time there is an update available. You will also be able to search and install extensions from within the add-on manager. The UI itself looks a lot like the new Ubuntu Software Center.

4) TaskFox:

Perhaps one of my favorite feature or at least the one that I am most looking forward to, is TaskFox. Which is an implementation of the power of Ubiquity within the Firefox browser. If you ever used Ubiquity you will understand how exciting this is. The final implementation may not be as powerful as ubiquity but you can check out the demo video  and see what it actually does or try it yourself (very limited demo).

5) More Standard Compliant:

Firefox has always been in the cutting edge when it comes to being standard compliant. With Firefox 4 they are pushing the envelope farther by supporting some of the CSS3 and html5 standards missing on Firefox 3.5. Some of those major supports coming on Firefox 4 are:

- CSS Transition
- CSS touch properties
- Forms in HTML5
- HTML5 Sections
- Support for WebM video
- WebGL

There are literally dozens of new standards coming up on Firefox 4, if you are a developer/designer you should definitely check out the whole list. However, it is important to understand that some of these standards are not necessarily de-facto standards, but standards that are likely to be accepted soon.

Final Thoughts:

I have always been a big supporter of Firefox and converted many friends and family to move to FF when IE development was stagnated. However in recent times FF was infected with the same “bug” that destroyed IE. The “bug” of slow innovation. Firefox has been slower and more crash prone in recent times and that’s why I moved to Chrome which is innovating in extreme pace.

However Firefox 4 new features and UI looks like a great reason to go back to using it as my default browser. Here, I just mentioned some of the main features that will end up in the final version, there are literally 100s of new features that I didn’t mention. Including one big one, Electrolysis, which is similar to tab per process model Chrome currently uses. However it is not clear if it will make in to the final Firefox 4 release.

These limitations of extensions also effect how all the ad-blocker on Chrome work. Chrome ad-blockers don’t actually block ads the same way Firefox ad-blockers do. You will be still downloading those ads to your browser but the ad-blockers will just hide the ad elements to remove visual clutter. Its still as good as removing ads like Adblock Plus on Firefox.

This limitation has two implications:

Bad: You are being tracked by ads under chrome with ad-blocker, even if you don’t actually see them.

Good: Anti-adblocking scripts don’t work on Chrome ad-blockers like they do with Firefox ad-blocker (on Firefox you can still bypass anti-ad-blockers, but needs some custom work).

An interesting observation is that currently Chrome AdBlock Extension is the most popular extension on Chrome extension gallery, it has more than 1 million users and almost more than double the user base of second most downloaded extension, which is Google’s own Gmail Mail Checker. That’s 1 out of ~7 chrome users using ad-blockers (Google claims Chrome has 70+ million users). The second most popular Adblock extension is AdThwart which is the 20th most popular Chrome extension with ~200,000 users, as of this writing.

What does it all mean?

I think mostly power users rely on extensions like adblockers, and just like Firefox, early adopters of Chrome are also mostly power users who are helping spread Chrome to the mass.

As mentioned before, both extensions works by hiding ad elements, because of API limitations so they don’t actually have any advantage over one another. What we will look at is their implementation of removing ad elements, how they effect the speed of the site and extra options each extensions comes with.

Benchmarking Ad blocking:

We tested 5 popular sites on normal browsing, then using Adblock and finally using Adthwart. Both extensions works under incognito mode (which is how we tested), we made sure that caches were clean before running site with or without each ad-blocker. We were surprised to see that site loaded faster with AdThwart on every single sites we tried on. Admittedly, not by much, but still interesting to see that a less popular ad-blocker has faster site load time than the most popular Chrome ad-blocker.

When it comes to blocking Ads, both extensions blocked (or rather hide) every single ad element on all sites we tried; just like Adblock plus on Firefox.

 * Both Adblock extension was running under default configuration on Chrome Stable, Windows7.

Options and Configurations:

Both Extensions have almost identical options, with the ability to whitelist/blacklist sites, choose multiple filter list and manually update them, block YouTube Video ads and text ads. Adthwart has a great option where you can block/blacklist element within a site with a single click on the icon. This is great for blocking non-ads or static ad elements. I think this single option along with faster site speed makes AdThwart a better extension. I think the reason Adblock extension is more widely used because its name is more obvious than AdThwart and probably has been around since the beginning. I also tried AdThwart when it first came out on extension gallery, I remember it being slow and resource hungry at that time, which is probably why it didn’t get off the same way AdBlock did. You should check out both of them and decide for yourself which one works best for you.

 AdBlock Options

AdThwart Options

Few Words on Blocking Ads on Sites:

There has been a lot of chatter on the blogosphere about ad-blockers (renewed with Safari 5’s Reader option) and how it affects small publishers and blogger and their single most popular source of revenue in the form of ads. I think people who use ad-blockers will use ad-blockers, regardless of whatever countermeasures or rational persuasion you want to employ. Its a losing game and there is not much you can do about it because you don’t have control over the content, once its rendered and downloaded in to a reader’s browser.

That doesn’t mean that everyone will block ads and all publishers will go out of business, because users who block ads are a minority power users, and often they have very valid reasons to block ads. They don’t like to be tracked by ad scripts even if the purpose is to give relevant ads, some people are distracted and put off by large number of flashy distracting ads. But even so there are power users out there who will whitelist sites that they frequent and care about, I know power users who do it and I myself whitelist sites I care about.

As publishers/Bloggers we will have to try harder to stand out so that readers can find value on the content and they will either whitelist your site or spread your  content to other readers who don’t care about ad-blockers. Another option would be to remove all ads and replace them with a single non-intrusive ad similar to The Deck. Unfortunately these kind of ads are not mainstream enough for small publishers like this site to take advantage of.

Sandboxed Extensions. Safari 5 is following Chrome’s example by Sandboxing and Digitally Signing extensions for greater security.

Reader. This is a unique and brand new feature for Safari 5. This is similar to how Readability work, which I wrote about earlier today. Reader works by pre-fetching and formatting contents, including removing ads and site-specific styling, giving readers uninterrupted focus on the content. Very cool feature, I can see myself using this often.

Support for more Html5 features: Few days ago, Apple created a Html5 demo page to showcase Safari commitment to Html5 standard, similar to what Microsoft is doing with IE9’s Html5 demo page. However the irony of the Safari demo page was that it is only open to Safari browser and it sniffs out non-safari browser by prompting a warning stating that demos are designed for Safari only. Note that all of those demos works just fine with Chrome, you can test those demo in your browser of choice by using this link, which was meant for developers and doesn’t block out non-safari browsers. Having said that, its good to see that all major browsers are committed to supporting web standards.

On Html5 Test Benchmark:

More is better

Faster JavaScript Engine: Apple own Nitro JavaScript Engine is 30% than Safari 4 and almost as fast as Chrome 5 on OS X. However outside its native environment, running under windows, its quite a bit slower compare to Chrome and Opera.

On Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark:

Less is better

The word “FAIL” should be only used for this kind of fail.

Html5 is the new craze in town. Even though the final draft is far from complete and the working specification is expected to reach W3C Candidate Recommendation in 2012, many aspects of the specifications are already stable and ready to be implementation. It it those stable specifications, which includes video, canvas, Geo-locations – to name a few – that everyone is gunning for. From Apple, who is embracing html5 video over flash; to Google who is slowly deploying html5 video to YouTube; Adobe who is adding Canvas importing option to CS5 and even Microsoft is trying to make Internet Explorer 9 a more html5 compliant browser.

As a matter of fact html5 is the one of the several selling points of IE9 (including faster JavaScript engine). So its deliciously ironic that both IE8 & 9 fails miserably on html5 test we conducted on the 5 common web browsers out there.

html5test.com is an online benchmark to test html5 compliancy of your browser. This benchmark is similar to Acid3 test which benchmark browser’s Web Standard Compliance and Sunspider which benchmark’s JavaScript performance. It is important to note that none of these benchmarks do a comprehensive benchmark of all available standards.

You can check out our JavaScript Benchmark we did earlier this year with the latest available browsers at that time. Opera surprised everyone developing the fastest JavaScript engine out there.

Benchmark done with latest public release of each browsers:

  HTML 5 Test: Out of possible 160

Internet Explorer continues its tradition of having horrible scores on standard compliance benchmark. They even went as far as claiming that having a good score on Acid3 test is not important to them. It will be interesting to see what IE developers at MSFT have to say now that they are trying to make IE9 more html5 compliant. Will they just brush off this benchmark scores just like they did with Acid3 or will they resort to misinformation about other popular browsers like they did with Chrome and Firefox.

Knowing Microsoft’s history, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they spend more time spreading misinformation than actually innovating their product.

Opera Mini, the world’s most popular mobile Web browser, was submitted to Apple App store more than 16 days ago and there’s still no news from Apple whether Opera Mini will be accepted or not. According to iPhone Dev Center 95% of new Apps are reviewed in the last 7 days, which makes Opera Mini a special case where Apple needs more than double their average review time to come up with a decision.

Opera made a compelling case for Opera Mini on iPhone by demonstrating how Opera is six times faster than Safari on iPhone and uses less bandwidth by compressing 90% of the data sent to your mobile device. Apple has a history of not approving apps that duplicate core functionality of the iPhone but is some special cases Apple breaks its own rules. Another possibility that Opera Mini might be rejected is the fact that Opera doesn’t use webkit as their rendering engine which all third party browsers are required to use in order to be accepted. (There is a possibility that Chrome might me ported to iPhone because it also relies on Webkit rendering engine.)

Opera using webkit would nullify the whole point of Opera Mini’s “selling point” that it is faster than Safari. Although Opera Mini’s beautiful and intuitive UI is compelling enough reason, it is highly unlike that Opera will rewrite their browser so that it can use webkit rendering engine. Specially now that Opera did a massive amount of performance improvements to its new rendering engine Presto and new JavaScript engine Carakan, which is currently the fastest JavaScript engine around according to Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark.

Whatever decision comes from Apple App review it will have an impact on the possibility of other non-webkit browsers being ported to iPhone OS. As for Opera, they continues to lead the way with browser innovations.

I have pointed out in the past how Microsoft has a habit of spreading misinformation about other browsers to help portray IE as a safer, faster with overall superior browsing experience. In the past they went as far as paying for browser security reports to make IE8 look better in comparison. This time the Product Manager of Internet Explorer Pete LePage relied on misguided and selective information to make Chrome look like a privacy menace. They are now threatened by Chrome, a browser that is not even two years old and has only about ~10% market share.

Product Manager of Internet Explorer Pete LePage talking about IE8 and Chrome’s privacy concerns. (Need Silverlight to play video, hosted by MSFT)

Selective Misinformation #1:

Pete claimed that Google sniffs information from Chrome browser address bar whenever you type anything on the address bar. He also claimed IE8 doesn’t. He demonstrated this by using a Web Debugger called Fiddler which can show you (among other things) all the connections your computer is making in real time.

The Truth:

Google Chrome address bar is not the same as an address bar on IE8 where you type URL to go to a specific site. On Chrome, the Address bar and search bar is combined together into a feature called omnibox. This feature is not unique to Chrome, this is also available on Firefox. As a matter of fact Firefox was first to come up with the idea, but it was Chrome who implemented it first. So when you are typing something on Chrome and Firefox address bar you are also searching for each term. Its an efficient way to maximize the space on top of the browser, without having to clutter it with two separate boxes, one for URL and one for searches.

So of course when you type in words on the omnibox it will do queries to Google or Bing or whichever search engine you have configured on your chrome configuration. As matter of fact when you set your default search engine as Bing and type in words on omnibox it does queries to Bing (look at the screenshot below). Is it right to say that Microsoft is snooping on your every letters and words when you type on Chrome?

 
Exhibition 1: Microsoft Spying on you when you type on Omnibox on Google Chrome

Pete also claimed that when you type on IE Address bar it doesn’t make any connection to your search engine, which is true because its not a search box, but when you do type something on the IE8 search box (which Pete wisely ignored to show) fiddler showed that IE8 makes connection to your search engine (shown below).

Exhibition 2: Microsoft Spying on you when you type on IE8 search box

So essentially when the Product Manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft tells you how scary Chrome is when it comes to security he is being deceptive because he is comparing apples to oranges. When you perform keyword search both on IE8 and Chrome (or any other browser), they all behave the same way.

Selective Misinformation #2:

In the second part of the video, Pete mentions about InPrivate browsing on Microsoft and how it protects you by not storing any information on browser cache,but absolutely fails to mention that Chrome also comes with a Private browsing mode called Incognito.

The Truth:

When you are making a video comparing privacy and security features of one browser with another its only fair to do the same in all instances. Private browsing was first introduced by Safari in 2005, Google Chrome did it 2 months after its initial release in December 2008. IE8 released private browsing mode in March 2009, 2 months after Chrome officially released it. Yet Pete forget to mention this important bit. As if, private browsing is something that is only available on IE8.

Exhibition 3: Late in the party, but just as loud.

Conclusion:

So this is what we have come down to with Microsoft. Instead of innovating with new features and adhering to industry standards they are relying on spreading misinformation about the new popular kid in the browser town. They have done it with Firefox and now they are doing it with Chrome.

Deception, misinformation and stagnating the industry with closed development and ignoring standards is the only way they know how to play the game.

I had some hopes for them when they showcased some of the improvements they are working on with IE9 and it seemed that they are slowly implementing industry standards in to their rendering engine. But today Microsoft reminded us again how they play the game.

With Microsoft, its business as usual.

  Chrome Extension Gallery Main Page

One of the most interesting thing about Chrome Extension gallery, when Google unveiled it few months ago, was the fact that they were showing the most popular (read: most downloaded) extension right on the front page. This is interesting because two of the most popular all time extensions are also ad blocking extensions. Google’s main revenue source, as you might know, is online advertisements.

At the end of last year one of those Ad blocking extensions (AdThwart) became the most popular chrome extensions, so naturally it was on the top of the list on the front page. I checked back few days later to see that AdThwart magically went down from number one to number three most downloaded and all the download count was much lower than it originally showed. (Yes, I was actually interested in popular extension download count.)

I can only speculate here than Google was not comfortable with the idea of an ad blocking extension being the most popular extension, so they manually adjusted it. Even so, AdThwart was still in the top six on the front page, until yesterday. I know this because I check the gallery now and then for try out something new and I was there last night and I saw it right in the front page in the same order as they show in the Most Popular list.

Today, after reading about the official support of Greasemonkey scripts (as extensions) for Chrome I wanted to check out if they were also listing those extensions on the extension gallery. I was surprised to see that the popular list on the main page does not show the most downloaded extensions in the correct order. As a matter of fact it doesn’t represent any kind of order in terms of popularity. Every refresh (wait few minutes) shows a new list of extensions. After six tries I got six separate  list of extensions and none of them were any ad blocking extensions (Your mileage may vary).

So what does it all mean? For starters, obviously someone in Google doesn’t think it is a great idea to give such easy access to ad blocking extensions right on the front page. As of this writing, the Most Popular list still shows two ad blocking extensions on the top ten list. Will it still stay the same when Chrome becomes more popular and ad blocking extension user count rolls in to millions? What’s stopping Google from blocking these extensions in the future when user base reaches a critical mass?

These are some of the tough questions Google will need to face in the future as Chrome becomes more popular.

Most Popular Extension Gallery

Most of us know that Opera has been at the forefront of Browser innovation for the longest time, yet remains at the bottom of pile when it comes to desktop browser market share. Its a sad story and even the best of us have a hard time figuring out why this is so. But this doesn’t stop Opera from making major innovations and changes with each new release.

With Opera 10.5 Alpha (Evenes), released today, comes a brand new JavaScript Engine (Carakan) written from scratch, and some major UI changes.

You can read more about the UI changes from Opera Blog, we will focus on the new JavaScript Engine performance.

Before this release Opera had one of the slowest JavaScript engine, after IE8, by a wide margin. Compare to the last release the JavaScript performance improvements done in this release is quite stunning. Webkit (used by Safari and Chrome) has been, for the longest time, de facto JavaScript engine in terms of performance but the latest Opera Alpha JS even beats the webkit nightly builds. But so does the Chrome dev builds. A lot of users might not know this; even though Chrome uses webkit as their rendering engine they have done a lot of JS performance of their own, which is why Chrome outperforms webkit nightly in the latest builds (read more here and here).

Let’s look at the current standing in JS performance according to SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark:

Note: Your mileage may vary depending on the OS and hardware you are using. The above benchmark was done on Windows 7 64bit.

Edit: Typo shows its chrome 2 dev, actually it was Chrome 4 dev (4.0.266.0 to be precise). Will fix it soon. Fixed

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share

However, the US internet users don’t share same browser preference as the rest of the world. IE8 still dominates the browser market here in US, but not by much (only ~3%). I think it is fair to say that by the first quarter of next year, Firefox 3.5 should be the leading browser in US.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share