Webware

Sometimes it's the little things that count.

The most prominent feature of Firefox 3.6 is Personas, which let you reskin the browser with thousands of different looks. But my single favorite change is a subtler change to the open-source browser's user interface.

Specifically, when you open a link in a new tab, it appears immediately to the right of the active tab. Before, the new tabs would appear to the far right of the strip of tabs.

Yup, that's it. For those of us who spend hours a day in a browser, though, the new tab behavior helps group related tasks together. I constantly shuffle among dozens of tabs, and the new approach automatically brings some organization to my cluttered life.

However, I know it's not everybody's favorite browser behavior. So along with explaining why I like it, I'll also take some potshots and share instructions on how to get the old way back.

Why it's better
The more things I do with a browser--and the number has increased steadily for years now--the more important it becomes to be able to find different tasks amid the chaos. Microsoft and Apple understand this, as evidenced by the new taskbar features in Windows 7 and dock expose in Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard. Those features make it easier to pluck out the one window you need from among the many you may have open.

There's a pattern to how I spawn the dozens of tabs I use as a day progresses. On a variety of pages--Gmail, Google Reader, Yahoo Finance, somebody's blog post--I'll encounter a host of links to other pages. I'll middle-click my mouse button to open interesting pages as background tabs, then use Ctrl-Tab to switch to the new pages when I'm ready. I repeat this pattern many times a day.

With the old behavior, each tab appeared to the far right of the tab strip. That's fine when getting started, but when I've moved halfway across the list and want to open another batch, I want the new ones--call them children--to open next to their parent tab. When I go away and come back, or when I lose place juggling tasks, it's easier to find my bearings again.

It's like being in a library. When you're in the European history section, you don't want to find books on rewiring your house and on vegetarian cooking.

As a longtime Firefox user, I didn't realize tab positioning could be better. When I started using Google's Chrome, which introduced the new tab behavior to me, the scales were lifted from my eyes. I immediately could get to the next tab with a quick press of Ctrl-Tab on the keyboard rather than have to use the mouse to click over to the far end of the list. I use both browsers daily, but until the Firefox 3.6 beta arrived, the new-tab position had become a sore point for me when in Firefox.

The change is actually a big deal in a couple ways. First, even seemingly minor changes in software can be disruptive. Old habits die hard, and computer users wrestling with constant change can get angry when more is foisted upon them.

Second, though, browsers are assuming an ever greater role in what people do in their personal and professional lives, and keeping one's bearings is commensurately important. That's especially true for those people for whom a gaggle of browser tabs represents a collection of chores going on in parallel.

Internet Explorer 8 categorizes related tabs by color.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

How the competition handles it
Tabs are now universal among browsers, but new-tab behavior isn't. Firefox and Chrome handle it the way I like best, but how do others tackle the issue?

First, let's look at Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft showed it understands some of the challenges of tab management in its latest version of its browser by coloring child tabs the same hue as their parents, but I have a gripe with how it works. Specifically, although child tabs get the same color as their parents for easy grouping and arrive to the right, grandchild tabs are the same color as child tabs. Similarly, grandchild tabs appear to the far right of the whole group of child tabs.

In my mind, I consider grandchild tabs a separate group from the child tabs. But with IE, grandchildren get the same color and position treatment as children. The only way to get a new color is to start a fresh empty tab There's no easy way to give grandchildren a new color without causing some confusion, though--should the child be the same color as the original parent or change color to be grouped with the grandchildren?

Next is Opera, which gives users a choice. By default, it opens new tabs to the far right, which I don't like, but in the Advanced|Tabs section of the preferences dialog box, you can check "Open new tab next to active." Huzzah!

There's a subtle change here I don't care for, though. Tabs always appear immediately to the right of the active tab. I'd rather have all one tab's children appear in sequence to the right. For example, if a parent tab is in position 1, then the first child would be in position 2, the second in position 3, and the third in position 4. Opening three child tabs in Opera leaves the parent in position 1, the third child in position 2, the second child in position 3, and the first child in position 4.

Last, there's Safari. It does it the old way I loathe with no option to change. Too bad.

Firefox can show thumbnail previews of new tabs, but I find them hard to recognize in front of busy Web pages.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Why it's not enough
Most browser makers are excited about the fact that their software is subsuming more and more computing tasks that previously ran on computer operating systems. But as browsers inherit this central importance, they also inherit some of the hassles.

The new tab positioning behavior in Firefox is a step in the right direction, but there's more that needs to be done. Moving from one tab to a related adjacent one, whether through a keyboard command or mouse clicking, is a minor change. But things get harder when you need to switch from one group of tabs to the next.

There's work under way here. Opera is perhaps the leader with the ability to show thumbnails as you use Ctrl-Tab to cycle your list of open tabs.

Firefox has been noodling with the approach too. It tried then dropped tab thumbnail previews earlier, but the technology is still present. Using the about:config system for tweaking the browser (more on this later), you can change the "browser.ctrlTab.previews" setting to "true."

But for reasons that aren't clear to me, I don't find this effective either in Firefox or Opera. Perhaps I haven't used it enough, or the thumbnails are too small to be immediately recognizable, or they're just hard to see against the noisy background. There's a good reason that Apple dims the background most of the way to black when using Expose.

Aero Peek in Windows 7 lets the task bar show a glimpse of Firefox and IE tabs.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Windows itself is helping, too. The new taskbar in Windows 7 can show individual tabs, once browsers support the feature. It's in Internet Explorer 8, and it's in the new Firefox 3.6 beta.

Add-ons such as Firefox Showcase can further tweak Firefox. (Indeed, for a wealth of options, check Mashable's handy Firefox tab management guide.)

More interesting to me, though, is work under way to expand Firefox's "awesome bar" abilities. Today, typing in it opens Web pages and retrieves ones you've already visited or bookmarked. In the future, it could be able to move you to another open tab, too. I'm a keyboard guy, so particularly appreciate this idea.

You can get a taste of the idea now. If you've enabled the "browser.ctrlTab.previews" option, hitting Ctrl-Shift-Tab will not only show you thumbnail previews, but will put a cursor in a search box.

Typing the letters of the Web page name will winnow down the thumbnails. For example, typing "netap" will cull my open tabs so only Net Applications and NetApp show. If you have a bunch of similar tabs all open, this might not help much, of course.

However, the feature only works with the tabs of one browser window, so if you can't use it to search among other browser instances.

How to get the old way back
Perhaps I've convinced you that the new approach is better. But perhaps not--in which case I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments so people will hear more than my opinion.

For those who don't like the new tab positions, you can revert to the old method.

To get the old style back for new tab position, use Firefox's about:config system.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

First type "about:config" in the Firefox address bar. You'll get a warning that you're tinkering with Firefox's innards and you should be careful, but this isn't brain surgery, so don't be frightened. Click the "I'll be careful, I promise" button, and you'll see a big list of all the browser settings that can be tweaked.

Next, in the text box labeled "Filter:", type "tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent"; you should see just one entry below. In the column marked "Value," double-click on the word "true" to change it to "false." You're done.

But I'd encourage you to at least give the new way a try. If you don't like it, you can always change back.

Last week, Microsoft showed off some browser technology that could help Internet Explorer leapfrog the competition. But if Mozilla succeeds in its hope, Microsoft could be playing catch-up instead.

The technology in question is hardware-accelerated graphics and text using interfaces called Direct2D and DirectWrite that provide an easy way to use graphics cards' computing power. They're built into Windows 7, and Microsoft is bringing them to Windows Vista but not Windows XP.

The performance boost from Direct2D and DirectWrite was the centerpiece of Microsoft's demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 goodies shown last week. Online maps flashed on the screen quickly and tracked mouse movements responsively; text was clearer and changed sizes more gracefully.

But the day of Microsoft's demo, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard had this to tweet: "Interesting that we're doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well--I'll bet we'll ship it first."

There's work to back up his rhetoric. On Sunday, Bas Schouten, the programmer who's been leading the work for Mozilla, posted a prototype of Firefox using the Direct2D and DirectWrite.

However, any Firefox fans tempted to crow about a victory should be cautious. Mozilla wouldn't commit to including the technology, much less to a release schedule such as Firefox 3.7 due in the first half of 2010. "We are currently investigating Direct2D for Firefox, but do not have a target for shipping it in Firefox at this time," the organization said in a statement..

Several Web pages arrive significantly faster using Direct2D rendering technology in Firefox.

(Credit: Bas Schouten)

The race is on
Microsoft declined to comment for this story, referring readers just to last week's blog post about coming Internet Explorer 9 features. "While we're still early in the product cycle, we wanted to be clear to developers about our approach and the progress so far," the company said while sharing a Direct2D demonstration video.

There's no doubt the race is on, though, given the potential benefits of the new interface and the commercial success of Window 7. Microsoft is lighting a fire under its developers, but the company's browser has lagged Firefox and other rivals in many technological areas for years, and many Web developers loathe earlier versions of IE still widely used. IE's market share has steadily eroded, though it remains dominant overall.

The attention is giving Google ideas, too. In a Chrome issue logged Sunday, Chrome programmer Peter Kasting pointed to Schouten's blog post on the subject as "motivation."

"If we can speed up the rendering time, the most noticeable benefit will probably be smoother-feeling scrolling," Kasting said. He also directed attention in October to DirectWrite support in Chrome, though cautioning that it might not work with the browser's present "sandbox" design to isolate elements of the browser for security reasons.

Mozilla has its own results to show off, too. Schouten offered a graph showing improved performance displaying a variety of Web pages. Facebook, Google, and Twitter rendered on the screen in half the time using the Direct2D; Slashdot and a Wikipedia entry were barely changed. One taxing page using the Scalable Vector Graphics format (SVG) to show movable, resizable graphics showed more than twice as fast, dropping from about 11 milliseconds to less than 4 milliseconds.

Microsoft's DirectWrite permits smoother display of many fonts.

(Credit: Microsoft)

What actually changes?
Direct2D replaces an older technology called Graphics Device Interface (GDI) used in Windows XP. Both offer a way for programs to tap into computing hardware without having to worry about the particulars of video card capabilities and settings, but Direct2D taps into hardware acceleration features.

The technology lets programmers control basic elements such as transparent boxes, curved lines, and resizable photos. Out of these, user interface elements are constructed; Direct2D calls upon a computer's graphics processor to speed that up. It's particularly helpful for dynamic situations that change element properties such as color, size, or opacity.

DirectWrite offers a similar graphics chip boost to the task of displaying text. That may not sound computationally intense, but some parts of it are. In particular, DirectWrite offers a more sophisticated mechanism for displaying text to take advantage of something called sub-pixel positioning of letters.

Each pixel on an LCD screen is actually made of three tiny slices--for red, green, and blue components--and sub-pixel technology subtly draws letters using pieces of these pixels to make the overall appearance smoother. The older GDI permitted some sub-pixel positioning, but only smoothed letters in the horizontal direction; DirectWrite smooths curves vertically as well.

Using the graphics chip in Direct2D and DirectWrite operations brings several advantages. Performance is the first: some operations are faster or smoother, and having more power on hand lets programmers tackle more ambitious projects. Second, the general-purpose central processor, relatively inefficient at handling graphics tasks, is unburdened, freeing it up for other tasks and saving battery power.

Firefox already has a graphics system of its own called Cairo. Schouten has been adding a Direct2D and DirectWrite.

Firefox is of course a browser that doesn't just work on Windows. The DirectWrite technology helps that operating system catch up to its rivals, said Mozilla's John Daggett in a blog post Sunday. "Platform APIs [application programming interfaces] on Mac OS X and Linux already do a good job rendering Postscript CFF [Compact Font Format] fonts," he said. "This just brings them up to parity under Windows 7."

Direct2D is used elsewhere in the browser. "We've made significant progress and are now able to present a Firefox browser completely rendered using Direct2D, making intensive usage of the GPU," or graphics processing unit, Schouten said. And because Cairo is used by other open-source software, other projects will benefit from the work, he added.

The Direct2D work is Mozilla's second hardware acceleration effort; the company also is working on one using a different hardware acceleration interface called OpenGL for mobile devices using Nvidia's Tegra chips, according to Mozilla.

This Mozilla demonstration of photos and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), with transparency and click-and-drag resizing, works more than twice as fast Direct2D graphics.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The interactive Web
Microsoft went out of its way to emphasize that the Direct2D and DirectWrite work will help existing Web pages without programmers having to change a line of code. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer, contrasted that to other hardware acceleration efforts including Native Client and O3D from Google and WebGL from Mozilla and the Khronos Group.

Native Client, O3D, and WebGL are part of a long list of developments designed to transform the Web into a foundation not just for static pages but also for interactive applications. Those technologies, though, require new programming skills and tools.

Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera have been pushing this interactive Web agenda, and Microsoft is showing signs of interest, too. However, for now, Microsoft emphasizes that Direct2D support will help the existing Web. But the browser makers have their eyes on interactive technology as well. Direct2D will help with complex sites that use 2D graphics interfaces such as SVG and Canvas, Mozilla said.

Added Schouten, "As Web sites become more graphically intense, dynamic graphics will start playing a larger role, especially in user interfaces."

With Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft showed Wednesday it's trying to retake the browser initiative.

IE remains the Net's dominant browser. But perversely, it became something of a technology underdog after Microsoft vanquished Netscape in the browser wars of the 1990s and scaled back its browser effort.

That left an opportunity for rivals to blossom--most notably Firefox, which now is used by a quarter of Web surfers, but also Apple's Safari, which now runs on Windows as well as Mac OS X, and Google's Chrome, which aims to make the Web faster and a better foundation for applications.

Microsoft has been pouring resources back into the IE effort, though, and at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, some fruits of that labor were on display. In particular, Windows unit president Steven Sinofsky showed off IE 9's new hardware-accelerated text and graphics.

The acceleration feature takes advantage of hitherto untapped computing power in a way that's more useful than other browser-boosting technology--Google's Native Client to directly employ PC's processor and Mozilla's WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics, for example--according to Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer.

"This is a direct improvement to everybody's usage of the Web on a daily basis," Hachamovitch said in an interview after Sinofsky's speech. "Web developers are doing what they did before, only now they can tap directly into a PC's graphics hardware to make their text work better and graphics work better."

LOS ANGELES--Although Microsoft intends to talk a bit about its plans for the future of Internet Explorer this week, the company won't offer preview code of its next browser, CNET has learned.

The software maker is also not planning to announce a move to the WebKit engine, as some had speculated.

Ray Ozzie, speaking Tuesday at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

In his opening keynote at the Professional Developers Conference on Tuesday, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie pledged that Microsoft will make Internet Explorer the absolute best Windows browser, but did not offer further details.

Microsoft is expected to talk more about its browser plans as part of Wednesday's keynote speech. During that talk, he is expected to talk about some--but not all--of its "focus areas" for the next browser version, a Microsoft representative told CNET.

The latest version of IE 8 was released in March and is also built into Windows 7. Despite the new release, though, Microsoft faces intense competition from Firefox as well as from Google and Apple.

In addition, Microsoft has struggled to get Internet Explorer users to move past IE 6.

Google's Chrome is still the fourth-place browser in terms of usage, but it gained more than others in October when it comes to stealing usage away from the dominant Internet Explorer.

According to Net Applications' browser usage share statistics, Chrome gained from 3.2 percent to 3.6 percent from September 2009 to October. The company bases its statistics on visits to a global network of 40,000 Web sites, dusted with some statistical processing.

Next was Mozilla's Firefox, which rose from 23.8 percent to 24.1 percent. Apple's Safari rose from 4.2 percent to 4.4 percent. Opera was essentially flat at 2.2 percent.

The big loser was IE, which dropped from 65.7 percent to 64.6 percent, according to the statistics.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--John Lilly wants it both ways.

Working at Mozilla Corporation since 2005 and as chief executive since early 2008, he helped oversee a remarkable achievement. Mozilla has built the Firefox browser from a largely unsuccessful remnant of the Netscape era of the 1990s into the browser that nearly a quarter of people on the Web use. Now the challenges are different.

Mozilla Corp. CEO John Lilly

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

First, for new growth, Mozilla must make its open-source browser appeal to an even more mainstream crowd, one that's more interested in working and playing online than in sticking it to Microsoft or being part of a cause. Second, it's got to keep the loyalty of the technically savvy early adopters and Web developers that Google now has been courting with its Chrome browser.

"We have to do both," Lilly said in an interview at Mozilla headquarters here. "We have to be a better browser for your standard everyday user of the Web who uses IE now, but I think we have to redouble our efforts to be good for Web developers."

The world changed for Mozilla when Chrome burst onto the scene in 2008. Mozilla didn't see itself as complacent, but Chrome was a wake-up call that "clarified some of our priorities," Lilly said, including snappy performance.

"It made some things real crisp," Lilly said.

Indeed, in the months after Chrome's arrival, these priorities appeared in Mozilla's Firefox planning: "Observable improvements in user-perceptible performance metrics such as start-up, time to open a new tab, and responsiveness when interacting with the user interface. Common user tasks should feel faster and more responsive." And future versions of Firefox likely will look more like Chrome embracing some of its less obtrusive framing of Web content and applications.

'Web-native' Google
Mozilla's biggest rivals before, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari, came from companies firmly rooted in the era of desktop computers and operating systems. Not so Google, which not only has Web-based applications such as Google Docs and Gmail to support, but also a browser-based operating system called Chrome OS.

"Competing was hard but at some level simple. Google is much more Web-native," Lilly said.

Google is an unusual rival. Even as Google and Mozilla vie for popularity, they're tight allies in the "Open Web" movement to augment Web standards to today's static pages into tomorrow's applications. And Google almost singlehandedly funds Mozilla by sending back a portion of search-ad revenue that originates from Google searches within Firefox.

In 2007, the last year for which Mozilla has released figures, Google supplied 89 percent of Mozilla's $75 million in revenue. Although the Mozilla-Google revenue-sharing deal is set to expire in 2011, realistically, it's probably safe.

For one thing, Firefox sends a large amount of search traffic to Google--traffic it could easily send to another search engine with the flip of a default setting switch. Second, Google's browser enemy is Internet Explorer, especially the slow and limited IE 6 that's still in widespread use eight years after its release. If Google wanted to cripple Mozilla, the time to do it would have been 2008, when the search-ad deal was up for renewal, but Google renewed it.

New standards
One big part of Mozilla's effort to remain in the vanguard is support for new Web standards.

Mozilla is among those trying to renovate Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to make it a richer, more capable foundation for programming as well as display. And its significant if not dominant share of usage makes it a major force bringing those "Open Web" technologies to fruition.

"There are still a lot people who think the Web is done--there's this big mission accomplished banner. It's not true," Lilly said. "There are many proprietary technologies, many walled gardens with respect to video and offline technology. There is still is a lot of the Open Web fight to fight," Lilly said. "Getting to Firefox--a quarter of the Web--shows these technologies are real."

One thorny one is Web-based video. Today most online video is sent using Adobe Systems' Flash browser plug-in, which is free; video is encoded with the H.264 standard, which must be licensed. But fees could increase in 2011 with the possibility of new royalties for streaming H.264 video over the Internet.

Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Perhaps not coincidentally, Google announced plans to acquire On2 Technologies, which has other video encoding and decoding software--or codec--including a new version under development called VP8.

"If VP8 is an open codec and unencumbered (by patent licensing considerations), it's something we'd implement. That changes the whole landscape," Lilly said.

The first update in a decade to the HTML standard used to describe Web pages is under way, and one major feature is a video tag that builds video directly into the Web rather than relying on a plug-in such as Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight, or Apple's QuickTime. Though Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera all like the tag, they don't see eye to eye about what format video should be encoded in, which complicates how well the technology works in practice.

Mozilla and Opera urge use of the Ogg Theora video format, which may be implemented in open-source software without licensing complications, and Firefox has had Ogg support since version 3.5 of the browser arrived earlier this year.

But Apple's Safari has H.264 support built in. Google's Chrome supports both standards, but YouTube supports only H.264. Microsoft hasn't said what it plans to do. So for now, video plug-ins appear unthreatened.

Microsoft in the wings
At the other end of the competitive spectrum is the incumbent. Although Microsoft's browser development crept nearly to a standstill after IE won the first browser wars of the 1990s, there's evidence the sleeping giant is awakening.

IE 8, released earlier this year, attempts to conform to existing Web standards rather than setting its own. And though IE still doesn't support many of the latest technologies to make the Web into an application foundation, Microsoft now is actively engaged in discussions over those technologies and their standardization. Finally, Microsoft is working on Web applications of its own in the form of an online version of Office 2010, giving the company a strong new incentive to improve its technology.

So far, though, Microsoft's effect is more theoretical than actual.

"They've given notice they will engage. We haven't seen them influence it a lot," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. He's eager about the possibility that Microsoft will embrace new Web standards. "They represent a large user base--some by choice, some not. Those technologies mean a lot more when they make it to more people."

Something of a wild card factor in today's browser wars is Apple, which has released a Windows version of its browser. The company rarely ventures out of its home turf of Mac OS X unless there's a strong incentive--releasing iTunes for Windows to boost the iPod business, for example--but evidently deemed Safari for Windows a high enough priority to fund development and support efforts if not much in the way of marketing.

Going mobile
Apple, though, has a big head start when it comes to the new era of mobile browsing that's just beginning to mature with high-powered devices such as the iPhone. Like it, Palm's Pre handset and Google's Android operating system for mobile phones use a browser based on the open-source WebKit project.

Firefox is moving more slowly into mobile, though. Its mobile browser project, called Fennec, is slated to emerge later this year under the Firefox brand name for Nokia's Maemo mobile operating system, and Lilly has said Firefox will be available for Google's Android operating system as well.

"I do more browsing than ever in mobile. The boundaries between desktop and mobile are going to blur," Lilly said. "We will release (Fennec) as a product called Firefox later this year."

Lilly likes to look at the bright side of this fluid landscape. "In most ways the world as a Web user is better than it's ever been. There's real choice, not just from Apple and Microsoft but from Google and Opera," he said.

"We're a unique organization. Compared to open-source projects, we look rather wealthy. Compared to the people we're competing with--Apple, Microsoft, Google--$50 million, $60 million, $100 million in revenue that to them isn't really meaningful," Lilly said. "We're competing in a low-expense, scrappy way."

From August (top) to September (below), Internet Explorer lost a bit of usage share compared with rival browsers.

(Credit: Net Applications)

All four of Internet Explorer's main rivals gained a larger share of users worldwide from August to September, new statistics show.

According to Net Applications, which tracks browser usage globally through a network of 40,000 Web sites and some statistical processing, IE slipped from 67 percent to 65.7 percent of users.

Firefox has steadily won over more users since version 1.0 arrived nearly five years ago, and it continued the trend with an increase from 23 percent to 23.8 percent. Apple's Safari rose from 4.1 percent to 4.2 percent, Google Chrome from 2.8 percent to 3.2 percent, and Opera from 2 to 2.2 percent. Although a few tenths of a percent may sound small, multiplied by the millions of browser users over the Internet, it can mean a large absolute number of people.

Some seeds for overhauling Web browser graphics were planted more than a decade ago, and Google believes now is the time for them to bear fruit.

The company is hosting the SVG Open 2009 conference that begins Friday to dig into a standard called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that can bring the technology to the Web. With growing support from browser makers, an appetite for vector graphics among Web programmers, and new work under way to make SVG a routine part of the Web, the technology has its best chance in years at becoming mainstream.

New Web programming standards are hard to nurture, but they do arrive, said Brad Neuberg, a Google programmer and speaker at the conference.

"First they're ignored, then they're hyped, then they're written off for dead, then they start getting real work done," Neuberg said.

Bitmap images, such as this part of Wikipedia's logo, don't scale gracefully to different sizes.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

SVG lets this Wikipedia logo be shown as many pixels wide as you'd like.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Vector graphics describe imagery mathematically with lines, curves, shapes, and color values rather than the grid of colored pixels used by bitmapped file formats such as JPEG or GIF widely used on the Web today. Where appropriate, such as with corporate logos but not photographs, vector graphics bring smaller file sizes and better resizing flexibility. That's good for faster downloads and use on varying screen sizes.

For one example, try the SVG version of the Wikipedia logo using the page-zoom tools in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera. It's a big SVG file, but it does scale. Another real-world example: the illustrations in Google Docs use SVG, Neuberg said.

But SVG has yet to catch on widely in Web programming circles, in part because the dominant Web browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, can't handle them. "It's hard to deploy this when you can't use it on most of the installed base," Neuberg said.

Google and various allies are working to change that--its Chrome browser along with Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera support SVG--and judging by the arrival of Microsoft as a gold sponsor of the conference, things could be turning around.

Other signs: vector graphics topped the list of desired new features in a Web programmer survey. And that result helped encourage Google to release a preview version of software called SVG Web that brings SVG support to browsers that lack it.

SVG Web can hand off SVG chores to browsers that support the standard. For those that don't, it runs a Flash program to handle rendering, Neuberg said. "It will never match the performance of native support. It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it does help developers and users deploy content," he said.

At the conference, Google plans to show the fruits of work with Wikipedia to use SVG Web. Actual deployment of the technology is still one or two months away, awaiting more testing.

One issue for SVG is that it's been part of the evolutionary dead end of Web programming, XHTML. But that's changing: the HTML5 standard under development right now explicitly makes room for SVG so it'll become a first-class citizen, Neuberg said.

There's another way of doing vector graphics in a browser, a standard called Canvas that's also part of HTML5. Canvas is best suited to drawing a shape on the screen that the computer then forgets about, whereas SVG is better when the shape will be manipulated because the computer keeps track of its elements and attributes, Neuberg said. For comparison, equivalents of the SVG and Canvas approaches both are available in Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.

Realistically, though, the bigger vector competitor today is Adobe's Flash, which is in widespread use already. And just to spice things up, there's Adobe's FXG, an SVG-based format for vector graphics within Flash.

An advantage of vector graphics in Web pages is that because they're constructed from text, search engines can see and index content, Neuberg said. For example, labels in an anatomy diagram, along with conditions and medical procedures, are relevant data that would be indexed--or for that matter translated with a service such as Google Translate.

"SVG, like HTML, can have hyperlinks coming in and going out," Neuberg said. "It's part of the Web. It integrates with other technologies, so it's not trapped in a box."

Mozilla and Microsoft don't always see eye to eye when it comes to browser technology, but they agree broadly on one thing: thumbs down for Google Chrome Frame.

Chrome Frame is a plug-in that puts Google's browser engine under the hood of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and Google argues that it can modernize IE versions 6, 7, and 8 with faster page loading and JavaScript performance. It kicks in only on Web pages that Web developers have labeled with a specific tag. After Google announced it, Microsoft criticized it as creating a potentially increased risk to browsing security.

Google Wave is one site that suggests IE users install Google Chrome Frame.

(Credit: Google)

Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering for Firefox backer Mozilla, published a different concern in a blog post Monday night.

"I certainly share that longing for a Web in which the vast majority of Web users enjoy the performance and capabilities we see in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera. Unfortunately, I don't think that Chrome Frame gets us closer to that Web," Shaver said.

Specifically, Shaver said Chrome Frame can disable IE features and muddle users' understanding of Web security matters. And users of the reviled IE 6 browser, he added, often won't be able to run Chrome Frame anyway because their computer is locked down to prohibit changes or lacks sufficient power in the first place.

"As a side effect, the user's understanding of the Web's security model and the behavior of their browser is seriously hindered by delegating the choice of software to the developers of individual sites they visit. It is a problem that we have seen repeatedly with other stack plug-ins like Flash, Silverlight and Java, and not one that I think we need to see replayed again under the banner of HTML5," he said.

Shaver's advice is to rely on that ages-old technique: an upgrade suggestion on the Web site.

"It would be better for the Web if developers who want to use the Chrome Frame snippet simply told users that their site worked better in Chrome and instructed them on how to install it," Shaver said. "The user would be educated about the benefits of an alternate browser, would understand better the choice they were making, and the kudos for Chrome's performance would accrue to Google rather than to Microsoft."