IE and Screaming Monkey
Mozilla is increasingly becoming popular among internet users. Popularity of any software relies on its user friendly interface and the features it offers such as troubleshooting etc. The availability of host of features provided by the Mozilla has made it the modern browser. It has evolved with the emerging Internet technologies. But when we look at the Microsoft Internet Explorer, it is quite surprising that in spite of the cut throat competition its implementers are either not keen or unable to come out of its mediocrity. Internet explorer lags behind Mozilla in many respects which have actually caused most of the web designers to remain confined to the suboptimal copyrighted solutions and it is holding the Internet behind . Taking a significant step towards dragging Internet Explorer into the new generation of open web technologies Mozilla has introduced its new experimental plugin that adapts Mozilla’s implementation of the HTML5 Canvas element so that it can be used in Internet Explorer. Now this sounds interesting.
With the help of this Canvas element bitmap images in HTML content can be rendered inactive programmatically by the web designers. This innovation actually belongs to Apple which implemented it first for graphics enrichment. Now it is the part of HTML5 standard. Though it is also used in Google maps but this was not available in IE and hence Google maps could not be used in IE. In order to make Google Maps work in IE, Google had to develop a complex library called ExCanvas. ExCanvas implements many of the Canvas element’s features with VML, Microsoft’s proprietary alternative to SVG. However it is quite slow. Vladimir Vukićević from Mozilla has developed a prototype which solves this problem. Mozilla plans to devise its own native Canvas implementation into an ActiveX plugin that can be integrated directly into Internet Explorer.
Mozilla is also in the news as it has moved a step more with its much more ambitious initiative called Screaming Monkey Project that enable plugging Mozilla’s entire next-generation JavaScript engine directly into Microsoft’s web browser. It is known as Screaming Monkey as it is actually working and an alpha release is available. If these plugins gain widespread acceptance, it will empower web developers and give them the ability to target web standards and not have to compensate as much for Internet Explorer’s broken behavior. But is that so easy?
Though Mozilla offers much better surfing experience to the users than the IE but still majority of the computers still have IE running and if Firefox is unable to attract these users towards itself i.e. to install Firefox then it would be interesting to see that why such users would install IE plugins which provide Firefox features. Moreover, Canvas possibly competes with Adobe’s Flash plugin in a certain set of use cases. But if Adobe collaborates with Mozilla to integrate this technology with next major iteration of the Flash plugin, it would rapidly accelerate adoption and get it onto lots of computers. None the less, Flash is not the only source of revenue for Adobe. The development is still at its early stage and is believed to land in the market by the end of this year. The web developers are waiting for the release eagerly. Let’s see how the story goes on.
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