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Being a bit of a web browser geek (if there is such a thing), I got a real kick out of interviewing Lindsey Simon, a front-end developer for Google's user experience team and a speaker at the upcoming Velocity conference. In the following Q&A, Simon discusses web browser testing, the potential impact of HTML5, and he reveals his favorite browser tools and interfaces.
What have been the key browser innovations of the last 3-5 years?
Lindsey Simon: The ability for users to customize and augment their browsers via extensions (that they can even write code for!) is really slick. Enabling that ecosystem has done more for the browser in my mind than most of the obviously excellent work going on under the hood in the Javascript engines and rendering engines.
How important is HTML5?
Lindsey Simon: The things I'm most excited about in HTML5 are standards-based catch-ups for features that have existed in extensions or plugins for a few years. So I'm not certain that HTML5 will change product design considerably, though it will change the implementation of those designs and perhaps lead to a more interesting ecosystem for richer applications. Hopefully it will also make systems previously built upon stacks of skateboards much more reliable and simple (I'm thinking of AppCache and WebSockets primarily here).
What do you think motivates people to change browsers?
Lindsey Simon: I might put sheer frustration pretty high on the list. There's fairly little opportunity cost to switch browsers, though as they're adding features like account sync and the like, that may start to change. I think word of mouth goes a long way, too. If developers are telling their non-developer friends to try a new browser that has some impact.
Do you have a rule of thumb as to when a developer can stop testing a site in a specific browser?
Lindsey Simon: It's always wise to look at your own products' logs as opposed to the percentages of adoption across the web. Using a percentage can be tricky. What if you have a relatively small user base and 10 percent is in fact quite important to your product's adoption and word of mouth? Also, I think it's important to think about the technology motivation of you project. If you're really trying to push the envelope with something, it may be okay to ignore older browsers. But if you're writing blog software, it would be irresponsible to exclude older browsers from reading your content.
Which tools or resources do you use for browser testing?
Lindsey Simon: I recently found Adobe's BrowserLab to be quite useful while developing a unit-test for some CSS button rendering code. It was like having a quickly accessible, visually available Selenium farm! Of course, it would be nice to automate it and/or be able to interact with the page itself, but for my purposes it was more efficient than firing up multiple machines to see pixel differences. Closure Library's JsUnit implementation is something I'm using heavily these days for testing functionality and rendering. I'm also looking forward to using Sauce Labs for some testing.
Your Velocity session will focus on Browserscope. What does that project aim to do?
Lindsey Simon: Browserscope is a community-driven project for profiling web browsers and gathering and organizing the resulting data. The goals are to foster innovation by tracking browser functionality and to be a resource for web developers. We're hoping to track improvements to browsers so that users have better experiences online.
Seeing as you spend your days as a front-end developer at Google, I'm interested to know which sites you think have the most interesting or usable interfaces.
Lindsey Simon: I guess it's sort of funny, but simple as it is, I like the NextMuni page as one example. It's a bookmark on my bookmarks bar, and I can load it and super-quickly find out when to catch my next bus to work or home. All in all, I'm still pretty happy using simple, readable "tools" online as opposed to try-to-do-it-all destinations.
That said, I think Android has done a lot to change how I consume content online. Though that's not really a website, sites that work well on Android get more of my attention. The New York Times does a fabulous job here. I've also been impressed by the work going on at Facebook to modularize and speed up their interface components. Two of their engineers gave a talk at Velocity last year that was very exciting. Their approach to process and using usage patterns to deploy HTML/CSS/Javascript optimizations is something I think we'll see more large sites doing in the future, if they aren't already.
Related:
- How Facebook satisfied a need for speed
- Why HTML5 is worth your time
- What will the browser look like in five years?
- HTML, CSS and Javascript: The other way to develop mobile apps
