MyTech

I noticed a passing twitter message from Laura Scott. It said One word: standards. Firefox follows w3c standards. Internet Explorer does not. She wrote it in response to another Twitter message from tutu4lu, who was having problems with a web page appearing differently with IE than Firefox.

It is true that Firefox implements more standards than IE, especially in when it comes to some of my favorites, such as SVG. And I appreciate the fact.

Firefox does not necessarily get an A+ for all of its effort, though. In particular, if Microsoft's lack of implementation of XHTML has been one force against broader implementation of XHTML at web sites, Firefox's own handling of XML errors in XHTML is another, more subtle force against XHTML.

Here's an example. I added an ampersand (&) to a URL in one of my posts, which generates an XHTML error. The following are three screen shots from Chrome, Opera, and Safari, respectively, that demonstrate how they handle the error:

Safari and Chrome are both built on WebKit, which handles XHTML errors by parsing, and rendering, the document up to the error. This has the advantage of providing some content, as well as being able to more quickly find the error when you're debugging.

Opera doesn't render the document, but it does provide a display of the source with highlighting where the error occurs. This is extremely helpful when you're debugging a larger document. In addition, Opera also provides an option to render the document in HTML, rather than XHTML, which is helpful for everyone else.

Contrast and compare these screenshots with the following, from Firefox.

The Firefox XHTML error handling is also known as YSOD, or Yellow Screen of Death. It's harsh, abrupt, and somewhat punishing in nature, with its sickly yellow background, and bright red text. The message is typically cut off by the edge of the browser window, so one can't easily see where the error has occurred. It's most definitely intimidating for readers who accidentally stumble on to an XHTML page currently in a broken state.

All four of the browsers do support the XHTML standard, and all stop processing the XHTML when an error occurs, as is proper. But where Safari/Webkit, Chrome/Webkit, and Opera try to provide a useful web page, Firefox picks up a ruler and gives the owner of the web site a good whacking.

It's easy to fall into the trap of blaming all web development and design problems on Microsoft and IE, and to use IE as a whipping boy—to the exclusion of looking, critically, at the other browsers in the web space. If the lack of support for XHTML in IE is a primary inhibitor of the spread of XHTML, Firefox's YSOD has to take the second place prize. Support for XHTML doesn't end at the parser.

Chrome released on Linux, and IE8 released from beta. Now people are beginning to question Firefox's increasingly bigger piece of the blogger pie. Case in point, PC World.

Mozilla have several grand aims, and there's much to be admired, but they've forgotten how to make a decent browser. I feel plenty of loyalty for them, because they've done more than anybody else to further the cause of open source software in the real world. But when I tried Chrome, as incomplete as it was, I realized I'd found a replacement for Firefox. As soon as it gets to beta under Linux, I will switch to Chrome. No question. It's just infinitely better. It's like when we all switched from Alta Vista (or Yahoo!) to Google back in the early noughties. The king is dead! Long live the king!

I was asked my opinion about the future of JavaScript applications this week, especially in light of the blazingly fast Chrome. I was rather surprised at the emphasis on JavaScript, because a browser is more than just a machine to consume script. A browser must also render a web page, as the designers built her; must display photographs accurately, hopefully using any photographer supplied profiles; to render the more complex SVG, in addition to the simpler Canvas; to handle complex file types, including video files, not to mention supporting different markups, such as XHTML in addition to HTML; to provide the utility to enhance the user's experience, up to and including any extensions, such as the one I use to collect a page's RDFa. Why, then, are we reducing the browser to nothing more than a device to to render HTML and JavaScript?

Firefox is working on its scripting engine, but it's also been improving its graphical rendering engine, including adding in built-in support for color profiles, as well as improvements in support for CSS3 and SVG. Chrome has no support for color profiles, it's graphical rendering engine sucks, as can be seen if you look at CSS3 curved corners in the browser, and it regularly fails my SVG tests. Try this SVG file in Chrome, but don't blame me if your CPU spikes. Luckily, it seems that Chrome just aborts SVG files it can't handle now, rather than fry the CPU. Then try the same page in Safari or Firefox; though both render the page slowly, they do render it—Chrome only rendered the file the third time through. It aborted the page the first two times. And the quality of the rendering? Well, see for yourself.

Look at my photos at MissouriGreen. Most use a color profile. Now, the photos look relatively good in Chrome on Windows, because I'm favoring a sRGB color profile to ensure maximum coverage, but if Chrome is ever implemented in the Mac, the photos will look plain, and washed out, as they do now with Opera. Not so the latest Firefox, and Safari.

Lastly, look at this site, or Just Shelley in Chrome, as compared to Safari, or Firefox, even the latest beta of Opera. I make extensive use of box and text shadows, as well as CSS3-based curved corners. No browser is perfect in its implementation of CSS3 curved corners yet, but the anti-aliasing in Firefox and Safari is vastly superior than what you'll find in Chrome. I have noticed, though, that Chrome has improved its text and box shadows: it doesn't plaster them half way down the page, now.

Why, then, do we talk about how "superior" Chrome is? And how Firefox is dying? When one looks at all of the browsers from an overall web experience, only IE8 is worse than Chrome.

I apportion blame for an over-emphasis on fast script over everything else equally between Google and the current HTML5 effort. I found it telling that, at the same time people are lambasting Firefox for "slowing" down, and praising Chrome for "speeding" up, Douglas Bowman is leaving Google primarily because the company relies on engineering practices, at the expense of fundamentals of design. One doesn't have to stretch one's intuition in order to see that the "machine" is also the emphasis in Chrome. But the same could also be said about the HTML5 effort: an emphasis on mechanistic aspects, such as client-side storage and drag-and-drop, at the expense of a more holistic environment, such as including support for SVG and ensuring continued support for accessibility—though I think this week, at least, client side storage has been pulled for inclusion...elsewhere.

Speed is important in a web browser, speed and efficiency, and Firefox isn't perfect. Newer versions have been locking up on my Leopard machine, to the point where I now prefer Safari on the Mac. If I had to take a guess, Firefox has threading issues. It also needs to work on isolating extensions to the point where they can't harm the overall browsing experience—or at least put something in place so that one knows certain extensions can adversely impact on browser performance.

At the same time, Chrome desperately needs to improve its graphics rendering capability. As this occurs, and as Chrome gets loaded down with extensions, I don't think we'll see the same fast speeds when rendering pages we see now.

It's all a question of balance—the best browsers are the most balanced browsers, and sometimes this means slower page loading in support of better page rendering. As it is, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera are all giants towering over the anemic and disappointing IE8. If we want to talk about a browser "dying", I have a better candidate in mind than Firefox.

As of this first week in January, 2009, the web statistics at my five main sites read as follows (only values greater than or equal to two percent are listed):

Burningbird (main page)

Burningbird RealTech (this site)

MissouriGreen

Secret of Signals

Just Shelley

Analysis:

I'm not surprised to see the Windows 2000 users, and am assuming the MSIE 6 users among my stats are primarily based in the Windows 2000 operating system. This state may continue into the new year because of Microsoft's decision to provide MSIE7 to Windows XP users and up, without providing an official upgrade path for those people still using Windows 2000. Not every Windows 2000 machine can easily upgrade to Windows XP. However, if people can't upgrade their OS, they can upgrade their browser to Firefox 3.x or Opera 9.x, and possibly other, supported, browsers.

As for MSIE 5.5, good golly folks, it's time to move on. And no, these are not Mac Classic users, as the Mac Classic OS percentage is typically less than 1%, if it shows at all in my site stats. No, I would imagine that most of these people bought a Windows 95 or 98 machine that came installed with 5.5, and the thing is now too infested with viruses for them to use, much less upgrade the software.

Speaking of upgrading, Firefox 2.x users, as of December, Mozilla is no longer supporting your browser. Firefox 3.1 is just around the corner, and is very sexy. Time for you to move, too.

There are few other browser percentage surprises. My primarily tech sites, RealTech and Secret of Signals, feature a larger percentage of Firefox users than my two non-tech sites, MissouriGreen and Just Shelley. What was pleasantly surprising, though, is that Firefox is becoming the dominant browser at the sites. Just Shelley is about the only one still heavily dominated by MSIE.

Safari's use is increasing, which isn't surprising because it really is the best Mac OS X general browser, as well as now being available in Windows. Safari/Webkit's graphics rendering engine is the best, a topic on which I'll have more to talk about, directly, in a writing I'm doing on SVG.

I would have expected, though, some increase in Opera use. I started last year with Opera at about 5%, and it's still about 5%. Actually, the lack of change is a little spooky—who ever heard of a straight line in a chart related to the web?

But where's Chrome? That's what I thought when looking at the stats, and finally spotted it at under 1% for this site, only. What did the pundits say last year? Chrome was going to be a threat to Firefox? Well, I don't think we need to dump our Firefox t-shirts just yet.

Based on the trends from last year to now, when I compare this year's stats against next year's stats, I predict they will show the following:

• The number of users of the new Windows 7 operating system will be inversely proportional to the number of Windows Vista users
• More Chrome users, but Firefox and Safari should still see incremental growth.
• Fewer MSIE users, with most switching to Chrome or Firefox.
• After MSIE8 releases, we'll quickly be able to see who are the MSIE personal users, versus MSIE corporate users, because of the MSIE8 upgrade blocker.
• We'll see a significant reduction in MSIE corporate users, as many will get laid off.
• Mac OS X use will continue incremental growth, and everyone will still be questioning Steve Jobs' health
• Opera will continue with 5% of the browser market. Spooky.