Browser

Mozilla had planned to disable the insecure versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the TLS protocol in Firefox 74. Unfortunately, they reverted that planned change. This post explains how to disable insecure TLS versions yourself.

After many years as a happy user, I switched from Chrome to Firefox. How did that go? Astonishingly well! Here are some notes I took in the process. My History of Changing Browsers Netscape to Internet Explorer I think I started out with Netscape Navigator on Windows 95. My first change of browsers happened with Windows NT 4 and Internet Explorer 4. That was a great browser! Everybody switched to IE in the following years. Microsoft’s domination of the browser market (yes, that was a reality for many years) started right there with IE4. Internet Explorer was successful not only because it was bundled with the operating system, but also because it was a good application.

To monitor web app performance and usage on any site (or just on your business-critical SaaS apps), take a look at our uberAgent product. In a nutshell, Firefox Containers makes it possible to log in to a website with multiple different accounts at the same time. This is accomplished through data segmentation: cookies and other site data stay within the boundaries of a container.

An architecture overview of current browsers on Windows: Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. In case you are wondering: I did not include Edge because it is currently being transitioned to the Chromium rendering engine, which might change a few things. I did include Internet Explorer because it is still the default browser in many enterprises.

There is more than one way to test the performance of web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or IE, but regardless of how you do it, you need a consistent workload that makes the browsers comparable. Unless you are testing with synthetic benchmarks (which come with a plethora of problems of their own) you need a way to automate browsers opening tabs and loading URLs. This article presents a simple solution to do just that.

You have probably been in this situation: on some shopping site you put an article in your cart, but decide not to buy it after all. Later on, you notice that you are getting targeted ads for the exact same product on totally unrelated sites - or so you think. There is, however, a common denominator: the ad network. It tracks you quite effectively as you move from site to site. Many people are not exactly happy about that and turn to ad blockers to guard their privacy. This article looks at one way to measure the ad blockers’ effectiveness in terms of keeping their users’ privacy.

Web video is ubiquitous. We take it for granted that browsers play video in high resolution, over any connection, on any device. Behind the scenes, a complex machinery of video formats, codecs, and GPU acceleration techniques is at work to make it all happen. This post explains what is what.

How do popular browsers differ in compute footprint when running animations? In this article I am comparing the CPU as well as the GPU utilization of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. To make things more interesting I tested GPU performance on Nvdia and Intel.

GPU acceleration is en vogue. After slowly but steadily moving out of the 3D niche it has arrived in the mainstream. Today, applications like Microsoft Office leverage the GPU, but even more so do web browsers. Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all have hardware acceleration turned on by default. People generally seem to be happy about that - GPUs are super-efficient, the more work they do the fewer remains for the CPU, overall energy consumption is reduced and battery life increases. Or so the myth goes. Interestingly, facts to prove that are hard to find. Nobody seems to have measured how GPU acceleration affects CPU usage. Let’s change that.

The days are long gone when a browser was just another application. Modern websites are applications of their own, and the browser is their operating system. That has consequences for monitoring. It is no longer sufficient to gather performance data for the browser as a whole. When, for example, Internet Explorer’s CPU usage is high, Administrators need to understand what caused that. Is it the business-critical ERP site or are people just watching fun videos on YouTube?