Recently, the major players in the web browser market have released their fastest web browsers ever. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 on March 14th. Mozilla released Firefox 4 on March 22nd. Apple release Safari 5 last summer. Google Chrome 10 released on March 8th.
Web Browser marketshare Feb 2011
This is fantastic news for the next wave of innovative ecommerce innovative tools that leverage client-side computing standards like javascript and HTML5. Specifically, shopping tools like product configurators, visual co-creation tools, and product finders.
New javascript engines
What do all these browsers have in common? Enhanced performance. These releases include new javascript engines that make the overall user experience significantly faster than before.
From Google’s Chrome site, “Under the hood, Chrome is fitted with V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine that we built to run complex web applications with lightning speed.”
From PCWorld, “Firefox 4 also sports a number of new features designed to improve page loading and rendering performance. Firefox 4 can take better advantage of your graphics card than Firefox 3.x could; using it to play videos, for example. Firefox 4 also includes an updated JavaScript engine that should improve performance of Web apps and certain elements of Web pages.”
Hardware acceleration
Speed
From Wired, “IE9 Beta owes much of its speed boost to the new hardware acceleration features inside the browser. It passes off the most complex rendering tasks — animations, video and heavily-styled text — to the graphics processor, and its new JavaScript engine (which Microsoft calls Chakra) is capable of using your PC’s extra processing cores to execute scripts on pages.”
Focus on client side computing
What do all these browser enhancements mean? Browsers are taking on more computing tasks, running complex computations on the client-side, away from the server. This means that web developers can shift their focus from heavy server-side processing to local, PC-based processing. The result is less browser refreshes and more desktop-like performance in the browser itself.
Web browser market share – including mobile
According to Wikipedia, Internet Explorer still has the greatest market share, but Firefox, Chrome, and Safari and growing more quickly. And mobile is already almost 5% of overall web traffic and will continue to grow. Most mobile devices support javascript, but do not support Flash.
The adoption of these turbocharged browsers will push forward the next generation of ecommerce applications because they make shopping on the web a fast, fun, convenient experience. From our whitepaper on “what consumers want from a product customizer,” 76% of respondents said that performance was very important. And from GetElastic’s study on performance in the context of ecommerce, shoppers have little to no patience for slow loading pages, saying 2 seconds is time they will wait before abandoning your site.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | ecommerce, javascript, shopping, web browsers
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