This young engineering student could pass for any regular guy.
Dressed in T-shirt and bug-eyed, he keeps his bony fingers through flicking through different tabs on his Firefox browser. When they start loading (”man, you can’t wait to see the page you want”), he fidgets; when it crashes(”this sucks”), he cusses. When power is off(or when he has to return to the nether-world you and me live in, for God’s sake), he moans.
World Wide Web is his default reality. Firefox is his default door into that.
What sets this young man, and people like him, apart, is the amount of time they spend inside their browsers,fussing over which browser to use, which loads faster, tweaking them to ramp up their performance. They have a feel fro the browsers. “I cannot do without being on the web,” says Raghu Ram, an engineering student. “It’s cool, you know, just feeling the kick out of clicking, and clicking and browsing.” With the browser mediating his experience with WWB, he says, ” I always look for improvements in different browsers, the way they perform, I just don’t want getting slowed.”
The Zen of Browsers:
A web browser , Wikipedia says, is ” a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.” As such, it’s an existential necessity for the those who spend most of thier lives cooped up inside the browser.
You have to have an in. Browsers— Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera—do give you an in.”what is interesting is , you just type in, off it goes and fetches the web page,” says
Kiran Kumar, a castaway into the web land who keeps several windows of his Chrome browser open at the same, each teeming with multiple tabs and them firing, and him flipping them for the heck of it.
For those who spend a lot of time inside the browser, using a particular browser seems an obsession, a harmless passion. They have a feel for simplicity, elegance, speed, compatibility, and above all, about how many tabs one could keep running concurrently. In addition to these, gushing about it to whoever listens. “Chrome is the best thing, it runs each process in parallel, so even one of the things gets messed up, it doesn’t affect the whole performance of the browser.” Moreover,”Chrome is kind of intuitive, with its no-frills input bar, it knows when to search, and when to just show the web page.”
In the soft glow of the screen, the browser is capable of astonishing things. “I am really hooked to the web,” says Satyanarayana, a developer, “it’s all because now we have browsers that can do a lot of work.” With lot of images, graphics, audio and video streaming through the web, browsers have lot riding on them.
“Yeah, there are truckloads of them out there on the web,’ he continues, ” and with that load you are looking for browser that’s really fast, doesn’t eat up system’s resources and doesn’t crash. I use different browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome for different purposes. I love this. It’s a developer’s game.”
A lot of mouth-breathing is done when the graphics and images pop on the screen. This is the place you go soak it —inside the browser.
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