Posts tagged browser
Browser Shootout: Windows Phone 7 vs. iPhone, Android
Aug 25th
A new video from Pocketnow compares browsing speed on a Windows Phone 7 prototype from LG, the iPhone 4, and Google’s Nexus One on Android. Even though the software’s not finalized yet, Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 is surprisingly competitive with the WebKit-based browsers on the iPhone and Android, beating or matching them in most tests. No Flash, Silverlight, or HTML5 A/V support yet, but the browsing experience is at least on par with the competition and at least won’t be a hindrance to the platform’s success.
While the rendering engine is a mix of IE 7 and 8, Microsoft has clearly put a lot of effort into the user experience, with silky-smooth scrolling, multi-touch zoom, and tab management. It’s a completely different animal from IE Mobile 6 on Windows Mobile 6.x (though most WinMo owners use Opera Mobile or other browsers in any case).
Video after the break.
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Opera Mini browser submitted to iPhone App Store [UPDATE: Video added]
Mar 23rd
Opera has just submitted the iPhone version of its mobile browser, Opera Mini, to the iTunes App Store. Opera Mini uses techniques like server-side rendering (loading pages on Opera servers and relaying only the end result to the phone) to dramatically speed up mobile browsing– on an iPhone 3GS, Opera Mini loads pages up to 5 times faster faster than Apple’s Safari browser. Yet Apple is virtually guaranteed to reject the app, since it “duplicates functionality” already in the phone (a reason Apple uses to anything that might compete with its own apps on the iPhone).
So the question is why has Opera gone to such lengths to develop a version of Opera Mini for the iPhone and submitted it to the App Store if it’s just going to get rejected anyway? First, Opera genuinely wants to have its browser available on the iPhone. The company’s been building buzz around its new iPhone browser through closed-door demos, likely to build up public support which could be mobilized to put pressure on Apple if it rejects the application. Second, Opera was one of the driving forces behind the 2007 European antitrust investigation into Internet Explorer on Windows, and there’s a possibility the company is looking to launch something similar in the iPhone space.
In 2007, Opera claimed it wanted to give “consumers a genuine choice of Web browsers,” a line the company’s CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, recently repeated: ”Opera Mini is the world’s most popular mobile browser and users on the iPhone deserve a choice.” Opera also just put up a page tracking how long it’s been since it submitted the app. Certainly a nice publicity stunt– now let’s see where the company goes with this.
Update: Video added after the break.
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Microsoft Demos Internet Explorer 9: Fast, HTML5, No XP Support
Mar 17th
Microsoft gave a demo of its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser at the MIX conference earlier today. IE9 is mainly about two things– bringing the browser up to industry standards, like HTML version 5, and improving performance all around. Its new JavaScript engine, codenamed “Chakra,” is dramatically faster than IE8, currently scoring in between Firefox and Safari, and still a bit behind Chrome and Opera, on the WebKit SunSpider benchmark. The browser still scores only 55/100 on the Acid3 test for CSS compliance, but Microsoft’s promised that will improve by the time IE9 ships.
IE9 sports dramatically improved JavaScript performance, thanks to its new "Chakra" engine
On the standards front, Microsoft has implemented a good deal of the HTML5 spec, including support for embedded video (using the H.264 codec) and audio (MP3 and AAC), scalable vector graphics (SVG2- for images that grow and shrink smoothly with different page sizes), and CSS3.
What does IE9 bring to the table that Chrome, Opera, and others don’t already have? The answer is that IE9 renders web pages using Direct2D, a new API introduced in Windows 7, and also supported in Vista and Server 2008, that provides hardware graphics acceleration for 2D rendering. This helps web pages look better (with sub-pixel text rendering) and load faster and is particularly beneficial for embedded videos.
Microsoft showed a demo of a page with two HD videos embedded using HTML5– IE9 played them both perfectly smoothly, while Chrome stuttered badly with just one video playing. The downside to this is that Direct2D doesn’t work on Windows XP, so neither will IE9. The company has made a test version available for download.
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