This is intended to be a brief review of the webinar that took place on October 28th, 2008.   I did the best I could to keep up with the presenters and summarize where I could the main points that were discuss.   Please excuse the roughness, as I can only type so fast ;-)

The talk began with a brief discussion on the usual Internet Explorer vs. Everyone else, as well as mentioning some of the newest browsers on the block (the web kit based) Google Chrome.

Browser wars divided into 2 periods:

1. 1995- Internet Explorer (part of win 95 Plus).   vs. Netscape   (this first war lasted 5 years of so, until Microsoft began bundling IE with every operating system; giving them a virtual monopoly.
   
2. New competitors arose (The Mozilla Project, and Opera, Safari, Seamonkey...)   The second competition, or browser war, has become: Internet Explorer Vs. The World.   Microsoft has started trying to compete, this is supposed to be especially true in the case of Internet Explorer 8.

Possible results from this war:
With so much competition, it should push all browser into a competitive war of improving each browser to be the fastest, and most feature rich out there.   (note: a good example of this is Firefox's significantly improving its javascript engine after Google Chrome came about).

Negatives:
With so many different browsers, developers are forced to try to support all of them.  Which can be quite the nightmare; and could hurt overall development.    Causualties of the browser war:   everyone.

Solutions:
Standardize the standards - make it so that all browser are forced to develop their browser in such a way that developers only have to cater to those standards, and not have to worry about individual incompatibilities.

Next battleground of the Browser wars:

Rich Internet Applications: The intent of RIAs is to be able to run the same, regardless of what browser they are run in.   The aim with these new platform (Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight...), is to standardize 'outside of the browser' Internet apps.

Everything in these new RIAs will be data dependant.  Things to consider, once data is retrieved in an RIA, how does the client use that data?

More problems: Even though something like Flash or AIR might work great cross platform, they are still prone to cross version problems.   Users will be forced to update all the time in order to be able to use all RIAs using such things.

One of the interesting things with the Browser wars is that although the competition may very well spur new development, the casualities of the wars could easily outweigh the pros.

Customers nowadays are expecting something different now, instead of just being used to synchronous, linear applications, average users are now familar with rich internet apps (example, eBay just deployed full ajax intergration).

Another interesting part of the new web that is developing is the sources of data.  Although the user is presented with a single user interface; they could easily be accessing a dozen different data sources in the background without realizing it.   The goal being to hide such back end things from the user.

Global browser market share.

1. IE 7
2. IE 6
3. Firefox 3
4. Firefox 2
   

As you can see, Internet Explorer is still the 800lb gorilla in the browser room.  But Firefox is gaining the most ground. (largest positive rate of change, particularly upon the release of Firefox 3).

A recent Adobe survey showed 93% of developers expect to develop a 'web 2.0' web app in the next year.

Difference between broswers:

Simple things: Browser are for displaying information.  Even with simple CSS/HTML browser incompatiblities can make pages that look perfectly normal on some browsers look completely different in others (more reason to 'Standardize the standards').    This can actually have a monetary impact (if your ads don't display correctly, or shopping cart elements don't work).

So what can you do to alleviate this problem?

At this point the solution is exactly what you'd expect.   Open up your website/web app in all the different browsers, screen sizes (and sometimes operating systems) to verify whether or not they display correctly and have the desired functionality.   Also, run a loading time test (particularly if you have a good deal of JavaScript.)   If significant problems exist, don't deploy.   (this takes valuable time away from developers where they should be developing software, yet another casualty of the browser wars).

Note of javascript engines.    In modern times Javascript engines seem to be leap frogging each other, the most notable example is the web-kit based Google Chrome.

How browsers connect to your websites.   Broswers typically make multiple connections to fetch different elements (html, images, related files).      (older browsers make 2 connections), Safari makes 4 connections.     Nowadays modern browsers make 6 connections (with the advent of broadband); this enables additional 'pipe-space' to load pages at a faster rate.

How do browser impact performance in the real world ?

By comparing users in the US on broadband.   IE turned out to be quicker for IE, then Safari, then Firefox.   One of the reasons for this is because of how each browser caches content.   In the case of Gomez.com, images weren't cached and firefox and Safari sometimes took twice as long to load.    So, problems like this should be taken into account; as they can be easily managed by the developers.

"41% of online adults click away when they encounter problems, often to competitors."

Upcoming Browsers:

• Internet Explorer 8
• Firefox 3.1
• Safari 4
• Opera 10
• Chrome

• HTML 5 Support
• New javascript engines
• Nift new features that previously required a lot of Javascript coding. (resource pre-fetching, embeded transformations and animations)
  
• Structured client-side storage.
• Increased Performance (faster JS processing, parallel downloads, multithreading support)
• Key trend: more and more client side processing

Thanks to Gomez for the insightful discussion, and Dr. Oge Marques for the invitation.

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