Web browsers just refuse to sit still. They just keep evolving to offer new speed and standards support, all moving towards the ultimate goal—enabling websites to do everything that native applications can. Case in point? The HTML5 getUserMedia draft specification. This new spec allows a webpage to access a user's webcam and microphone, dispensing with the need for a plugin such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft SilverLight to achieve this feat.
Opera 12 debuted this streaming media capability, with Google Chrome following quickly on its heels (Google is the driving force behind the WebRTC, or real-time communications, of which getUserMedia is a part). Opera's exploding camera demo gives you an idea of the potential of getUserMedia. It is still just a working draft, and competing browser makers will want to implement it in differing ways, but in the end, it's clearly coming.
In order to create app-like websites, however, browsers need not just the functions available to installed apps, but also need to equal the speed that straight-to-the metal apps can achieve. A concept introduced by Microsoft with Internet Explorer 9 was to use the PC's graphics processor to speed up screen drawing and other activities. This technique takes advantage of a PC's hardware to practically eliminate any advantage of native apps.
It's an idea that's been taken on by all of the major browser makers, at varying rates. Firefox has pretty much equaled IE9 here, and Chrome isn't far behind. Opera's maker has said that its goal is to hardware accelerate the whole browser's functioning, not just webpage rendering. Again, hardware acceleration isn't something that most of today's websites will benefit from. But those of tomorrow? Definitely.
So what about today? What do you want in a Web browser? You want it to be fast, able to correctly present any website you throw at it, and get out of the way. All of the current crop of software comes close to achieving this goal, while a couple of the lesser known players, Opera and Maxthon, add unique extras on top of this: Opera offers Turbo to speed up slow connections and a built-in BitTorrent client, and Maxthon offers screen and video capture, along with a raft of other power-browsing tools.
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