In the world of Web browsers, it’s beginning to look a lot like the 1990s, when the Internet was just starting to become an integral part of daily life and Netscape’s Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer vied for dominance. By the end of the decade, Microsoft emerged as the winner and Netscape faded into dotcom history.

This time around, the browser battle includes an increasing number of competitors, most notably Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome. But Apple’s Safari and newcomers like RockMelt, a start-up that promises to integrate Web browsing with social networking, are banking on innovative features to stand out in a sector in which users are reluctant to change.

Wharton experts attribute the new interest in part to cloud computing, which allows data to be hosted on remote servers and run on demand over the Internet; and mobile computing, which has put Internet-connected devices into everyone’s hands.

Meanwhile, some popular browser engines are now open source, meaning that anyone is free to use, change or enhance the software. For example, RockMelt, which began offering beta access on Nov. 8, uses the underpinnings of Chrome and integrates services such as Facebook and Twitter. A number of other browsers are based on Webkit, an open source project originally spearheaded by Apple.

Kendall Whitehouse, director of new media at Wharton, said open source has dramatically lowered the development costs involved with building a browser and “makes it much easier for a company to focus its development efforts on value-added services. [RockMelt] is a good example of open source components making innovation possible.”

Open source allows newcomers to enter the market without building technology from the ground up. Instead, players like RockMelt can focus on new features in search of the perfect browser.

“The ideal browser to me will be customizable, learn about my preferences over time, allow me to easily turn on and off social services and segment ‘friends’ for use in those services, and share my browsing history across multiple devices,” says Shawndra Hill, an operations and information management professor at Wharton. “The browser will most importantly help me to find the pages I am looking for on the web efficiently and effectively.”

Source:http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20101128/BUSINESS/11280330/1003/BUSINESS/More-companies-joining-battle-of-browsers

The browser race is hotter than it’s been in years, with all of major vendors ramping up support for HTML5 and its associated technologies. The latest area of focus is hardware acceleration — when the browser hands off processor-intensive tasks to the computer’s graphics processor to make animations and page rendering faster and smoother.
Microsoft created some controversy on its IEBlog this past weekend with a post claiming that the IE9 beta release was “the first and only browser to deliver full hardware acceleration of all HTML5 content.”

However, despite Microsoft’s claims, Firefox 4 also takes advantage of the same Windows 7 APIs that Microsoft uses to accelerate both the compositing and the rendering of webpages, and it has done so for some time. Yes, Mozilla’s hardware acceleration support is still very much limited to beta releases and nightly builds, but so are IE9’s hardware acceleration features.

Mozilla was understandably a bit angry about Microsoft’s misleading claims. But, to be fair, the IEBlog doesn’t actually call out Firefox by name, so it’s possible Microsoft sees Google Chrome as its real competitor. Chrome’s hardware acceleration lags behind Mozilla and Microsoft’s efforts, but even Chrome has included hardware acceleration for compositing in both Chrome 6 and Chrome 7 builds.

Confused yet? To help you keep things straight, here’s a handy chart showing all three layers of hardware acceleration and which browsers support each:

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Another strange claim in the post on the IEBlog is that IE9’s hardware acceleration is somehow faster because it doesn’t support other platforms — not even Windows XP. The reasoning is that by targeting on one platform, Microsoft can focus its efforts more clearly, and build tight support for behaviors specific to Windows 7.

In Firefox 4’s case, the hardware acceleration is somewhat abstracted, so it can eventually support Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows. Even now, Firefox supports partial Windows XP hardware acceleration.

Despite Microsoft’s claim, in our tests (and most others publicly available) IE9 and Firefox are neck and neck. And, as Mozilla’s Robert O’Callahan points out, “an extra abstraction layer need not hurt performance — if you do it right.”

In the end, who came first and how it’s done behind the scenes will be a moot point. Users will win in the end — a few months from now, there will very likely be three hardware accelerated web browsers available for Windows, with more operating systems getting the capabilities through non-IE browsers.

Source:http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/09/a-guide-to-hardware-acceleration-in-modern-browsers/