Wired News: Net Changing, So Are Browsers

Wired News website has an excellent article this week describing the upcoming wave of new, improved web browsers.

One high point of the article is the information that Firefox 2 will be in beta this summer, with the official release coming out in September.

Client-side programmers and XSLT gurus are probably anxious for this to happen, since it features the new Microsummaries feature.

The Grease Monkey extension has been out a couple years. It provides most of the capabilities of the Microsummaries feature.

However, Microsummaries seems to package it a little bit better. The ability to elegantly retrofit, in gist, a transformation stylesheet to a page or a website is going to turn out to be very happy.

Flock, which is based on Firefox - with some neat additions to make interaction with social websites easier, is also mentioned in passing.

Opera also gets a lot of coverage in this article.

The article also mentions the ongoing work at Microsoft on Internet Explorer version 7, the first new browser from Microsoft since 2001.

One surprise in the article is the statement that in the US, IE has seen its usage figures drop to 90 percent off its high of 97 percent.

Given the proliferation of new browsers, that is hardly surprising. What is interesting, is that it says Firefox usage is at 9 percent. That only leaves one percent unaccounted for.

Last time I saw Safari usage share, it was around 3 percent.

I guess there are some rounding errors in those numbers, otherwise the percentages do not up to 100 - they add up to 102.
Wired News: Net Changing, So Are Browsers:

Firefox 2, a 'beta' version for which is planned this summer and a full version by September, will also include anti-phishing features, along with tools to automatically restore web pages should the browser suddenly crash or require a restart. Other features in the Mozilla browser include a search box that can suggest queries as users type.

And Mozilla already has its sights on Firefox 3 next year, with plans to let users run online applications even when there is no live Internet connection.

Meanwhile, Flock Inc. released a test version of its Firefox-based Flock browser. Tapping into the recent wave of sites that encourage users to share content, Flock makes it easy to drag and drop images to MySpace.com and automatically notifies users when friends add items to selected photo sites.

Anyway, the takeaway from this article is that all the major browsers are actively working on improved releases.

It will be nice to have fresh new browsers.

One of the thing that is often overlooked about so-called web browsers is that they are often used in some role on the desktop.

Online help is one area that benefits from increased browser capabilities. So this next wave could be followed by a wave of of improved multimedia educational resources.

Apple and Pearson publishing announced increased work being done on educational software a few weeks ago. A web components company announced Encyclopedia Britanica is using Mozilla-based web components to improve the user intrface of its electronic encyclopedia.

DocBook 5 (now in beta 6) just added support for embedding MathML and SVG content in DocBook documents. Perhaps not coincidentally, Firefox has supported MathML since its inception - and it just added support for SVG late last year when Firefox 1.5 was released.

Programmer and user documentation for software is usually in a form that uses web document technology. So browser improvements could be a big boon to both software users - and software developers.

Also, browsers that support these cross-platform, W3-approved de jure standards could see them getting more traction in the educational and documentation applications.

The bottom line is that upcoming browser improvements are aligned to have an impact far beyond the web. They could lead to advances in basic day-to-day computing.