Future of the Web

Tablets, mobile devices, and even TVs are mediums through which the web is being accessed nowadays. And the social networking applications have changed the way people used to think about the web. Even in India mobile Internet browsers are outgrowing PC based browsers. Statistics from a global Survey this year shows that 49% of the 81 million Internet users in India prefer mobiles over PCs as a mode to access the Internet. People are using Internet for various purposes ranging from information access through Google or Wikipedia, to online banking, shopping, to stay in touch with friends through social networking platforms, and to get entertained. This shows how the devices are now influencing the world of Web and web applications.

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Adopting open standards

People who are skeptical about open standards are either those who are in dominant market position or are trying to do vendor lock-in for their applications. This is not just prevalent in browser but in any domain. The advantage of open standards from a consumer and a buyer's perspective is that if a piece of software has open standards it can be substituted with other software supporting open standards.

The case against open standard is from proprietary software makers as a customer will be using software which is built using proprietary standards and the customer cannot switch it with software as there are no alternatives. Opera promotes open standards and at markets where it is at challenging position it has experienced how difficult it is to compete with vendor who is not adopting open standards. Most of the modern browser vendors now are adopting standards; even Microsoft seems to be better at standards than previously.

Apps for varied devices

The slew of devices and platforms has meant that the developer now has to design and develop his application that could cater well on all the platforms. As a developer perspective it is really confusing, if he targets his application for PC browser then he'll be losing out on all mobile users and even tablet users. However with better CCS support now on mobile devices and mobile browsers than before, and writing one stylesheet that understands how that application has to render itself on different devices is now possible. Thus, writing applications with embedded capability to present itself as per the device by use of CSS will help developers to code their application once and then through CSS they can modify it for varied devices.

JavaScript optimization race

Be it any browser today, the race is to have the fastest JavaScript processing engine. The reason why JavaScript optimization is important is that there is something which is difficult and so cannot be done declaratively; it must then be done procedurally by implementing the functionality in JavaScript.

To write really sophisticated apps you'll find the need of using JavaScript in your web apps. So, various browser vendors are optimizing JavaScript performance so that they can render pages much faster than ever before.

Which means, we are now not limited to extent that applications will not have to be executed on devices; the browsers can take that JavaScript executing load.

This in turn allow the developers to create rich applications using JavaScript that can execute much faster and give better experience to the users.

Even though JavaScript optimization is important part in browsers, it is also important to look into features like touch gestures, and sliding back and forth of pages in touch devices; such features that will make the browsing experience pleasurable for the user are also important.