After a few hours on Tuesday of playing with the Zune HD that Microsoft sent me, I found a lot of things I like about it--the slim size, the Quickplay user interface feature that gives you immediate access to recently added and favorite songs, the big on-screen volume controls, and the Zune Pass, for example. But the Web browser seems like an afterthought.
CNET's Donald Bell had better luck with the on-screen keyboard than I did.
(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET)I know that mobile Web browsing isn't the same as PC browsing, but I've used Safari on the iPhone for more than a year, and it's great--I actually read articles, for work and fun, on my bus commute to work. It's so good, I've been taking it for granted. Not anymore.
Microsoft says the Zune HD's browser is based on the mobile version of Internet Explorer, but it doesn't look like any version of IE I've ever seen. The address bar is hidden--you have to pull up on the gray bar at the bottom of the screen to get to it. The other alternative is to click on a small magnifying glass to conduct a search on the mobile version of Bing, which I found difficult to use. (No slam against the full browser-based version of Microsoft's search engine, which I like.) For instance, when I conduct a search on my employer's name, "Directions on Microsoft," Bing Mobile assumes I want news stories that cite the company, when in fact I just want our home page. There's a link on the Bing Mobile site that says "web," which I assume is supposed bring me general search results from around the Web, but when I clicked it repeatedly, nothing happened. There's also no auto-suggest or auto-complete for search queries--each time you want to search for "Chinese restaurants," you have to type the whole query in.
Regardless of how you're trying to navigate, the on-screen keyboard seems to require more finger accuracy than the fault-tolerant keyboard on the iPhone (probably because of the smaller screen). The back button is hard to hit--I kept selecting the favorites menu by mistake. Sites are also considerably slower to load, and the resolution doesn't seem to be nearly as good as the iPhone or iPod Touch, with a noticeable flicker on pages with white backgrounds.
Maybe it's just me--Donald Bell thought the browser was great--but I can't imagine using this browser for any length of time.
Google introduced Chrome in part because it wants faster browsing and the richer Web applications that speed will unlock. So how does Chrome actually stack up?
Google's Chrome overpowers the other browsers on the five subtests by which Google measures its browser's JavaScript performance.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Lars Bak, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, said at the launch event Tuesday he's confident Chrome is "many times faster" than the rivals at running JavaScript, the programming language that powers Google Docs, Gmail, and many other Web applications.
But when pressed for specifics, he told me to try them out. So I did.
Google offers a site with five JavaScript benchmarks. On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition. I hope benchmarking experts and developers will weigh in with comments about how well these tests represent true JavaScript performance on the Web--either for ordinary sites or for rich Web apps.
Here's the site description of the speed tests:
• Richards: OS kernel simulation benchmark, originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards (539 lines).
• DeltaBlue: One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko (880 lines).
• Crypto: Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu (1,689 lines).
• RayTrace: Ray tracer benchmark based on code by Adam Burmister (3,418 lines).
• EarleyBoyer: Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch's Scheme2Js compiler (4,682 lines).
Google's overall score is head and shoulders above the competition for executing JavaScript.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)A few notes: First, your mileage may vary; I ran these tests on my dual-core Windows XP machine.
Second, my apologies here to Opera, whose browser I don't have installed.
Third, I tried to run the SunSpider benchmark tests as well, but perhaps because a lot of other curious people had the same idea on the day Chrome launched, I couldn't get to the site.
For many, privacy on the Web is a concern. And for Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, privacy is a feature.
In a meeting with reporters this week, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search, portal and advertising platform group, said the company's browser will come with a private browsing mode. And Long Zheng of the istartedsomething blog surfaced two telling Microsoft trademarks that appear related: Cleartracks and Inprivate.
Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search, portal and advertising platform group
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Both trademarks are involved with Web browsers, according to the applications with a July 30 filing date. The Cleartracks trademark involves "computer programs for deleting search history after accessing Web sites," according to the Microsoft filing. And the Inprivate trademark involves "computer programs for disabling the history and file caching features of a Web browser; and computer software for notifying a user of a Web browser when others are tracking Web use and for controlling the information others can access about such use."
One obvious use case for privacy browsing modes is surfing the Net for pornographic materials without leaving traces, but other, less unseemly use cases also exist. "Users may wish to begin a private browsing session to research a medical condition, or plan a surprise vacation or birthday party for a loved one," according to Mozilla's discussion of a private browsing feature.
Microsoft didn't comment on the applications beyond a brief statement, "We are investing in privacy in IE8."
And in a June blog posting, Microsoft said privacy is one of the major components of the "trustworthy browsing" element of Internet Explorer 8. "The larger challenge here is notifying users clearly about what sites they're disclosing information to and enabling them to control that disclosure if they choose," the company said. Microsoft said privacy means "the user is in control of what information the browser makes available to Web sites."
Internet Explorer is the dominant Web browser, and version 8 is in beta testing now and due in final form later this year.
Programmers have envisioned a private browsing mode for Mozilla's Firefox browser but so far haven't put the privacy feature into the open-source browser. Apple's Safari has a private browsing mode.
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