SCC- Part 6, Browsers

By Bayle Emlein

Browsers

 

Thomas Ford talked about web browsers. He used to work for Opera, but changed jobs about 6 months ago and is now working in a new area at Soundrop.com. Although music is the focus of his new passion, Opera is still the number 1 browser.

In the past two years Chrome has become the #1 browser. Opera has changed its core engine. Opera supports Googles new engine, Blink. The goal is to be faster. The Google Blink team has removed 8.8 million lines of code.

Firefox annoys advertisers by turning off certain cookies. The Firefox idea of "Do Not Track" did not go over well, for obvious reasons.

Opera has also lost code weight to become more nimble. The Stash is sort of a temporary bookmark setting.

Chrome works where IE 8 won't and is fast. Thomas thinks it won't be long until which browser we use. On mobile platforms, the browser is already loosing importance. Firefox is talking about a mobile version, In the meantime, Chrome is shipping an update every 6 weeks, forcing innovation everywhere. In the race to streamline, apps are taking over from browsers.

For those concerned about privacy, DuckDuckGo.com does not track. There is a trade-off between convenience and privacy. The added filter of suggestions based on a previous search can be quite helpful. The option of private browsing does not collect cookies or other tracking. There is also the option of going into tools and cleaning out cookies. Cleaning out your cache will solve many browser problems. Just be careful not to clear out too much, like your passwords.