itnews.com.mt » Browser Wars

HTML5 – not good enough

Jes Darmanin — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 07:17:04 +0000

After Apple went out of their way to publish an article that says that the iPhone and the iPad will NEVER get Flash… adding also that the flash plugin is; buggy, slow and outdated technology. Apple have also advertised it’s support for the latest HTML5 format, and that they say this is the way to go as a new standard for web animation/video.

Youtube however just released a different statement, saying that “HTML5 is not yet ready to meet all of its needs.”

John Harding, software engineer at YouTube, highlights six areas where HTML5 is lacking compared to Flash. There are:

Standard Video Format – Not all browsers support H.264 because of licensing concerns, holding back HTML5.
Robust video streaming – There’s more to video that just pointing to a file. People want control to be able to stream live video or go to a particular spot in a video.
Content Protection - DRM! No matter how you feel about it, some content providers love it.
Encapsulation + Embedding – There’s a lot more to a YouTube videos than the video. There’s stuff such as captions, annotations, and advertising.
Fullscreen Video – Still a pain for HTML5 to handle fullscreen video.
Camera and Microphone access – Some folks record their YouTube videos using YouTube, something that’s not possible with HTML5.

Bottom line is that YouTube is, for now at least, dependant on the Adobe Flash platform for some elements of its business. This means that Flash isn’t going to go away overnight, no matter how much Steve Jobs wants that to happen.

Opera 10.5 for Windows announced

Jes Darmanin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:20:30 +0000

To make the browser war even more competitive, Opera has just released a new version of their browser. The latest version (10.5) now includes some of the industry standard features like Private Browsing mode and Windows 7 look and feel. However this browser also includes new features like a new revamped rendering engine for faster website loading speed and also a special Opera Turbo mode for a faster browsing experience.

It also includes a new feature called Visual Tabs, which by using a special drawer you can see a thumbnail view of all open pages. Finally this broswer includes also special tools and widgets to help you out in your daily browsing needs.

The most revolutionary feature in this new version is Opera Unite. Opera Unite is a technology platform allowing you to share content directly with friends without having to upload anything to a Web site. You can stream music, show photo galleries, share files and folders or even host your own Web pages directly from your browser.

Firefox is now the world’s most popular browser

Jes Darmanin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:34:06 +0000

Data released by StatCounter indicates that Firefox 3.5 is (for now) the world’s most popular browser, having edged ahead of Internet Explorer 7.

Looking at the data, it’s quite possible that Firefox 3.5 won’t retain the top spot for long as Internet Explorer 8 is catching up fast, and will get a further push from Windows 7 sales.

No matter what browser you happen to be a fan of, you have to admit that that Mozilla’s dethroning of Microsoft’s iron grip on the browser chart is very impressive and quite an achievement.