Essay on SLP 1 INFORMATION NETWORKING AS TECHNOLOGY: TOOLS, USES, AND SOCIO-TECHNICAL INTERACTIONS: Web Browsers’ Utility
Formally simple computer programs, browsers have actually become the main link between the Internet and the man and the way how they perform their tasks determines our perception of the virtual world. However, the answer to the question “Which browser is better?” is not so simple and involves several aspects, in particular, “Which browser is more reliable while saving information about the session?” or “Which browser is faster?” or “Which browser is more functional?”Further in this paper, we will provide the main results of practical comparative analysis of Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Lunascape.
First of all, it should be marked that Mozilla Firefox is my regular browser, mostly because it provides a full set of web applications for working with mail, news, client chat which could be widely personalized and supplemented with a lot of add-ons, both paid and free. The advantages of the browser include easy work with bookmarks, in particular, the ability to import bookmarks from a previously saved copy or from a different browser. When working with different news and social media portals (The Economist, Pinterest, Taobao.com, etc.), I’ve also evaluated protection in blocking pop-up windows and the ability to work with RSS, which has always been Firefox’s priority in marketing (Jin et al., 2011, p.83). Generally, Firefox security and privacy settings cover all the basic features: they block phishing sites and other malicious sites, Do Not Track mode allows blocking third-party cookies. In addition, Firefox 16 clearly shows the level of security of a bank or a trading site (whether it is safe, with safety in question, or the resource is not secure) by displaying the corresponding icon in the address bar, which has been not noticed in other browsers.
On the other hand, all three competitors have multi-tab services, the functions for favoring most interesting sites, and autosave of data input, all of which are of crucial importance when operating at various sites simultaneously (for instance, making the same search request in both Google and Yahoo, pinning tabs with live news, and opening Facebook and Twitter from favorites). The browsers under consideration also offer a supplement that works at emergency closing, and after the launch, the browser prompts to restore the last session. The latter function, however, is significantly adjusted in Lunascape, where in the case of an error on any web page, only one tab, not the entire browser, gets closed.
On the other hand, Mozilla Firefox is generally heavy, and we have to agree with Grigorik (2013, p. 113) who remarks that a lot of its settings and extensions adversely affect the RAM by its occupation. This sometimes leads to active lockup of each of the simultaneously running processes, which was particularly vivid in my experience with ATP World tour site overloaded with flash and Java content. However, the same problems were also observed in my work with the latest Opera version, which was particularly annoying by not remembering previously saved certificates. Still, Opera has opportunities to load pages from the Internet faster than other browsers due to specific methods of traffic processing by Opera Turbo. This function helps to work with slow Internet and a relatively low volume of available traffic. The application cashes the page and then loads it not from the server but from the local storage, i.e. text and basic design elements are loaded immediately followed by the media data, and layout. However, its work is not always stable, and as practice showed it is clearly not suitable for pages written in AJAX, as Garsiel (2013) explains.
In this regard, we need to focus particularly on the performance shown by Lunascape. Here, it must be mentioned that since its appearance on the market, Lunascape has been called The World’s First Hybrid Engine Browser, as it is combining three of the most popular engines for processing and display web pages – Gecko (used in Firefox), Trident (used in Internet Explorer) and WebKit ( used in Safari and Google Chrome) (Toto, 2008). Due to an optimized implementation of Gecko technology, this browser is faster than everyone else in processing JavaScript scenarios, which was proved by starting Amazon.com. Still, although the browser developers claim that Lunascape is twice faster than Firefox in data processing (data were obtained on the basis of SunSpider Javascript Benchmark test results, Toto, 2008), Lunascape 5 Alpha version generally starts slower than its competitors. However, which more important, the browser offers the unique ability to quickly switch between the three rendering modules. Thus, opening a website, you can specify which of the three engines should open it, as well as further assign a particular engine to a particular page, and even test and compare the appearance and behavior of web-pages with different rendering technology. Due to this unconventional solution, Lunascape eliminates all the problems associated with cross-browser compatibility. On the other hand, this allowed developers to position Lunascape as an alternative to installing several different browsers on one device, which I typically do, by having Chrome, Opera, and Firefox simultaneously to use them for different tasks. Still, the main drawback of Lunascape is the lack of visual speed dial panel, like those that can be seen in Opera or Mozilla Firefox and confirmed their functional viability.
On a whole, the functionality and performance of all three browsers showed quite optimistic results, while the testing of Lunascape opened up new perspective features a browser may have, and its further usage in my daily life will be considered specifically. However, at saving memory by switching off unnecessary Mozilla add-ons, it proved to be faster than others in processing data and Java scenarios, as well as, to my subjective opinion, reassured its leadership in the intuitiveness of design and easiness of personification.
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