Web Performance Tuning

Popular Browsers

There are a lot of browsers, but only a few are widely used. See http://www.boutell.com/openfaq/browsers/ for a comprehensive list. The following five browsers are distinguished either by their market share or their features.

Netscape

As of this writing, Netscape Navigator, usually called “Netscape,” still has the largest browser market share, but it has been losing ground to Internet Explorer. Netscape 4 was a major overhaul of Netscape 3. Netscape 1.0 and later versions all have persistent connection ability, but use it via a Connection: Keep-Alive header rather than as part of a full implementation of HTTP 1.1. See Chapter 10, for more about HTTP. Netscape exists as native code for Linux, Solaris, Macintosh, Windows, and many other platforms.

Netscape has made the source code for their browser available on the Web at http://www.mozilla.org/. This opens the door to performance improvements by the Internet community as a whole. I’m personally hoping that someone will write a filter which eliminates blinking GIF advertisements.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is bundled with every copy of Windows 3.1, 95, and NT. Because Windows has a monopoly on commercial PC operating systems, Internet Explorer is already installed on nearly every PC desktop. This fact, combined with the similarity of the two browsers, removes the incentive to even take the time to install any other browser. Whether Microsoft may continue to bundle IE with Windows is in the courts as of this ...