The browsers war is heating up again. It’s not Internet Explorer vs Mozilla anymore. There are many now many new players. Hot the heels of the recently announced Google’s Chrome, we now have Stainless from Mesa Dynamics. Yes, it seems the name and the browser is inspired by Chrome. While Chrome does not currently run on Mac OS X, Stainless seems to be the Chrome answer for Mac OS X users.
Indeed, Stainless sports features similar to those of Chrome: dragging tabs between windows, private browsing, and a combined location and search bar. Where Stainless differs, and also stands out from other existing browsers, is that it features multi-process browsing in which each tab or page runs a process separately. This means each tab can run unhampered by other tabs that might be slow to load. Also, other tabs remain unaffected when one of the tabs crash or becomes unresponsive. Cool.
At this time, Mesa Dynamics says that Stainless is primarily a technology demonstration. It is clearly so, because while it does load web pages nicely, there are many other user interface details that are not quite there yet. For example, there is almost nothing to configure. (Of course, maybe some people think that is a good thing.)
Stainless uses WebKit to render its pages. WebKit is the same rendering engine behind Apple’s Safari browser.
Those of us who have been around long enough on the Internet might have remembered names like Mosaic and Netscape. Mosaic brought us the web. Microsoft soon overran the world with their Internet Explorer, which was decidedly hugely successful because it was included in each copy of Windows. In recent years, we have browsers like Firefox, which descended from the Netscape and Mozilla heritage, offering users choices in their browsing environment.
Actually while there are many browsers out there, there are only a small handful of web rendering engines. The web rendering engine is the “core” that paints the web pages on the screen. The most common web rendering engines are:
- Trident — Used originally in Microsoft Internet Explorer since version 4, but now also in other other 3rd party browsers like Avant.
- Gecko — Developed by Mozilla for use in Firefox. Now also used in Camino (on Mac OS X), Epiphany (on Linux).
- WebKit — Apple’s fork of KDE’s KHTML, used in the Safari browser (including in the iPhone). It is also used in Google’s Chrome.
The browser competition is good for users. Not only do we get choices, but it improves the quality of the browsers as well. Lots of attention is given to standards compliance, interoperability, security and performance nowadays. This is important, because the web is now the platform to deliver many applications and services. The computer isn’t so important. The operating system isn’t so important. Users are interacting a lot with their browsers.
What browser are you using today?
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