The Browser Report

BrowserMob uses networks of real browsers around the world to provide more authentic load testing than simulation. Leveraging Selenium it allows recording. They’ve used cloud computing services like Amazon’s Web Services to keep costs down.

From their announcement:

BrowserMob is the world’s first load testing service that uses real browsers (Firefox 3.0.3 to be exact). It’s on-demand, low-cost, and super easy to get started with. And best of all: you only have to pay for what you use.

Read all about it: http://blog.browsermob.com/2008/11/open-for-business/

The Chrome browser project, codenamed Chromium, has released documentation on its upcoming Extensions mechanism. There’s discussion of the project statement, the seven goals of the extension system (Webby, Rich, General, Maintainable, Stable, Secure, Open), and common use cases prior to disclosing their current proposal. Here’s the top-line proposal:

We should start by building the infrastructure for an extension system that can support different types of extensibility. The system should be able to support an open-ended list of APIs over time, such as toolbars, sidebars, content scripts (for Greasemonkey-like functionality), and content filtering (for parental filters, malware filters, or adblock-like functionality). Some APIs will require privileges that must be granted, such as “access to the history database” or “access to mail.google.com”.

Extension components will typically be implemented using web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS with a few extra extension APIs that we design. Extensions will run in their own origin, separate from any web content, and will run in their own process (with the exception of content scripts, which must run in the same process as the web page they are modifying). Some form of native code components may also be supported, but the goal is to minimize the need for this in extensions.

Read the full proposal and follow the project at dev.chromium.org.

David Recordon writes on the O’Reilly Radar blog that after the address bar and search box (navigation), identity is the most important other thing for a browser to know. Except he said it better:

Google Chrome did a smart thing: Less. They unified the search box and address bar, since that’s what people do anyway. That gives us back precious pixels for the only thing that’s as important to an average web user as where they’re going: Who they are. Identity belongs in the browser.

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Robert Hansen writes on the Internet Security blog an interesting piece about Browser Power Consumption.

While this exercise was not a real scientific study, it provided enough evidence to point to clear areas of power consumption in every day web applications.

He tests IE 7.0 and Firefox 3.0.4 on a Dell laptop.

The Results

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Dion Almaer’s delicious links included this news of the PhoneGap project. While not exclusively about browsers, our readers will likely be interested in the PhoneGap project which aims to “bridge the gap between the web and Mobile Devices.”

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Bernard Lunn on the ReadWriteWeb blog published an article today called Why is Google Not Deploying Gears Aggressively?. In it he pulls from interviews with Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise and Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering.

To prove their slow adoption of Gears he points out that Zoho (the cloud-based Office suite that competes with Google Docs, etc) has been using it for nearly 18 months.

Further:

So, the big question is, “When will Gmail enable offline use via Gears?” I posed this question to Dave Grirouard, President of Google Enterprise. The response was along the lines of, making it work on the scale of Gmail is not a trivial engineering challenge. That sort of made sense. But Gears has been out for a long time; it is a critical feature, and Google has the best software engineering talent on the planet.

The next point muses on Chrome, Google’s browser

Is Google holding up Gears until Chrome can support Gears? We hope not. That seems contrary to its philosophy to date, which has been to couple them very loosely. So that is probably just coincidence.

(The comments point out that Chrome bundles Gears already, so perhaps that line of thinking is moot.)

In terms of Mobile, the author “was told that Gears in a mobile browser was, of course, the “holy grail.”"