Thank you for covering the browser market. Many users don’t understand that they have a choice of browser and by discussing the alternatives you help promote a healthy ecosystem and honest competition. In covering this important topic it’s easy to be loose with terms, but some shortcuts cross a bridge too far. A few are listed here here along with a rubric to help you understand why they make you (and your esteemed publication) seem less interested in hard facts than I’m sure you are.

“JavaScript rendering”

As I’m sure you know, JavaScript (aka “ECMAScript”, aka “JScript”) is a programming language, not a UI toolkit or rendering technology. Yes, JavaScript drives the UI of many modern web apps like GMail and Google Maps, but it does so through a technology called DOM. DOM is not a part of JavaScript, it is instead bolted on to JavaScript by the browsers. “JavaScript rendering” would be a non-sensical thing to say even if you were describing the time it takes to build up a user interface. But I rarely (if ever) see such a story. Instead, this rhetorical abomination most often shows up in discussions of JavaScript benchmarks. These benchmarks work very hard to ensure that they aren’t affected by any DOM or UI operations. They test everything but rendering. In your defense, there is a strong correlation between faster JavaScript execution and faster rendering. But they are not the same thing. Best to just stay out of this particular gutter.

Acceptable alternatives: “javascript execution”, “javascript performance”, “DOM rendering” (but only when discussing things that measure DOM performance).

“Plugin”

Strictly speaking, a browser plugin is a bit of native code (written in C or C++) that speaks a particular set of ActiveX and NPAPI interfaces and registers itself with browsers in a particular way. This definition might as well be written as “plugins are magic”. The best known items of this class are Flash and Silverlight.

What you need to know is that there is an emerging class of things that users can install into their browsers which are similarly magical but which are not plugins. These things go by different names: “extensions”, “add-ons”, and (confusingly) “toolbars”. I’m sure there will be others. You can think of these things as being interchangeable with each other but not with “plugins”. So how do you tell which is which? A good rule of thumb is that if a web page works fine without you installing it, it’s an extension. Otherwise, if you need to install something for the page to work, it’s a plugin.

Acceptable alternatives: “extensions” (preferred), “add-ons”, “toolbars” (overly specific, may confuse).

“HTML 5 support”

This is one for the nag file since you’ll need to revisit this topic in the future. The important thing for now is to be cognizant that there isn’t yet a real “HTML 5″. Yes, there are various drafts, and yes, some browsers are doing a great job of implementing these new features ahead of formal standardization. But it’s not done yet. Saying today that something is an “HTML 5 application” or that a browser has “HTML 5 support” will cause you problems. Nobody wants to explain how what was touted as being “standard” one day became “proprietary” the next. The safest course of action here is to simply talk about “the upcoming HTML 5 standard” or “advanced web applicatons”. HTML 5 is a powerful brand and there’s going to be an enormous amount of haggling over its meaning for years to come. Best that discussion not include references to your stories.

Regards,

Alex Russell