How I Stopped Waiting for Websites to Load, And Learned to Love a Faster Browser.

Think about all the seconds we spend waiting for a slow site to load. In an eight-hour workday, I counted 10 minutes of idling — and that’s on a supposedly leaner Chrome browser on a laptop. It doesn’t sound like much, but 10 minutes a day adds up to a mind-numbing 40 hours — not counting weekends or two weeks of vacation — each year.

Web designers often load a site with high-resolution images, embedded video content and complex code for a more enjoyable user experience, but it strains and adds bulk to once-nimble browser.

As the Internet has evolved, the browser has largely remained unchanged, keeping the same basic interface, performance and functionality from the first variants released at the dawn of the Internet.

But as mobile use increases — and the way we access the Web changes — a new crop of browsers are keeping pace with that rapidly evolving landscape, and challenging established stalwarts as gatekeepers to the Internet.

Some New Ideas

When Scandinavian company Opera created its first browser in 1994, it never quite dominated then-leading Netscape and Microsoft. Despite a crowded field of competitors, it did manage to carve out a 300 million following, in part, due to a strong hold in gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and DS, and mobile devices like the iPhone and Android tablets.

But now Opera’s created “Coast,” a browser specifically for tablets, featuring a stripped-down interface.

The leaner, touch screen-optimized experience has just two features: a home button and a small key to show the most recently visited sites. Instead of forward and back buttons, simply swipe back and forth to browse to view the history. To enter a link or search the Web, just tap the home button.

There are no bookmarks or menus to clutter the view, and the result is a surprisingly sparse and elegant design, making the Internet resemble an app store instead of a list of links to page and scroll through.

Coast isn’t a perfect — it froze on me on a few occasions, especially during video content — but I found the experience surprisingly engaging. With no buttons or a constant in-your-face link and search box, I read through more content on each page and wasn’t as easily distracted and annoyed.

At first I found it irritating being unable to hop to the top of the page to enter in a link, but once I was used to it, the experience was actually more relaxing. Browsing sites on Coast was easier on the eyes, allowing me to greater appreciate well-designed sites.

Coast, sadly, is confined to iOS, but the company told TechCrunch it plans to bring it to more platforms, including Android, in the near future.

I’ve become a jaded Internet user, but Coast recaptured the sense of excitement and exploration that I felt in the early days of the Web, when browsing was a much cleaner and calmer adventure.

Dust Off That Browser

It’s easy to take browsers for granted: they’ve been around as long as there’s been a World Wide Web. But before then, the Defense Department actually developed a predecessor the late ’60s, with a corralled network of universities mainframes, dubbed ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, that transmitted data to one another.

The first message on ARPANET — which over the next two decades would evolve into the present-day Internet — went live on October 29, 1969 when Charley Kline, a UCLA student programmer, sent out “login.” Well, actually, it was “lo” — his computer crashed before it finished sending, foreshadowing the plague of browser issues that would haunt us for years to come.

The turning point of the Internet happened in 1989, when British scientist and pioneer Tim Berners-Lee created the now-famous Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, protocol. Two years later, in 1991, he introduced the first Web browser, which could translate and render HTML code into text and simple graphics in an easy-to-view format.

He called his browser the “World Wide Web.” It opened a window into the vault of scientific information at Swiss research facility CERN. Browsers stayed in the bastion of academia for some time, connecting researchers to reams of text-based data.

I was in college in the early ’90s, and used another text-based forerunner, called Lynx, developed at the University of Kansas in 1992. While it didn’t render graphics like the Berners-Lee browser, it connected me to sites, not only to grab data, but to take part in a thriving community of newsgroups, bulletin boards and other Internet-based gathering spots.

Even if Lynx was simple, the ability to jump from site to site and community to community was exciting, almost magical, and it was simple and lean, ideal for the slow hardware and low-bandwidth available at the time.

In fact, there was even a ritual in the computer lab: 1. Start up Lynx. 2. Run out and get coffee or a Coke for a late-night caffeine-fueled session. 3. Come back minutes later to find the browser finally up and running.

The next significant leap came with the ability to render complex images. Developed at the University of Illinois in 1993, Mosaic was the first browser to display text and images together, in a layout — a link at top and a window of content below — that’s still the interface of choice for today’s browsers.

But Mosaic, also the first browser to run relatively easily on Windows computers, was achingly slow due to slow Internet speeds at the time, so the team behind it — with Marc Andreessen, its leading architect — decided to make something better, and in 1993, they introduced Netscape Navigator.

Navigator catered to the burgeoning “consumer” level of connectivity, working well with the 14.4-kilobits per second standard of dial-up modems. Another advancement was on-the-fly loading to speed up rendering. In fact, according to PCWorld, at Netscape’s height in 1996, three-in-four consumers went online using its products.

Of course, those good times came to an end when Microsoft entered the burgeoning browser wars. In 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95, packaged with Internet Explorer, or IE for short, giving consumers little reason to install third-party browsers like Netscape. By the third version of IE, in 1996, Microsoft had found its stride. It added features to support multimedia, add-ons like e-mail, as well as ActiveX support and Java applets for robust functionality.

Shortly afterwards, IE drove Netscape into an afterthought, a gravestone in the history of the Web.

But IE laid the groundwork for a Web that could now support media and streaming, as well as gaming and e-commerce. The innovations that Microsoft added into IE paved the way for the commercialization of the Internet, and the larger economy it would enable.

But of course, as with most things Microsoft does, consumers still found fault with its browser. Some felt IE was bloated, taking up too much memory, and others railed on its security lapses. Still more, like Andreessen, felt Microsoft was forcing IE down the throats of consumers as part of the Windows package.

Those that didn’t want Microsoft looked for alternatives, and they found it when Firefox rose like a phoenix from the ashes of Navigator. Built by the open-source Mozilla Foundation in 2004, Firefox was considered a more secure alternative to IE, lauded for its quick response to critical vulnerabilities in its code.

But the most influential browser today is arguably Chrome. Google, a relatively late entrant in the Internet, claimed for years it wasn’t interested in making a browser. But it relented and hired ex-Firefox employees to create the lightweight, minimalist browser that became Chrome.

Chrome wasn’t the first browser to feature separate tabs, allowing you to keep different sites open at once — that honor belongs to the obscure Internetworks company — but it did refine the simple and elegant layout, even featuring an “omnibox” so people could search its engine from the spot to enter a Web address.

On a technical level, Chrome ran multiple processes on separate browsers simultaneously, allowing you to work in one tab while music played in another, for example. And if one tab crashed, theoretically, the others would remain functional.

Those features made Chrome the choice for a new generation of Internet-goers who work and play on the Web, often while writing e-mails, watching YouTube clips and checking social media on the side.

But Chrome has security flaws, as well. According to USA Today, it stores sensitive personal information like names, bank account numbers and credit card numbers, unencrypted, in the cache, without a users’ knowledge or consent.

In fact, NSS Labs found that Chrome offered the poorest privacy protection of all the major browsers.

Users have also long loathed the way Chrome can hog memory and crash during multimedia use, particularly Flash, and privacy watchdogs often point to the uneasy amount of data, though anonymous, that Google collects through browser use.

An Eye on Privacy

The innovation of Coast is in design and interface, but others are offering features that speak to the growing desire for increased security, especially in an age of massive data harvesting. For example, Epic, created by Hidden Reflex, keeps the central tenets of privacy and safety in mind. While it looks a bit like Chrome — it’s based on the same software engine — your data won’t be sent to another party to store and analyze.

It blocks all trackers and ads, and rejects all cookies, ensuring nobody can reach your personal data from the history. It encrypts data over Wi-Fi, as well, and when you close a tab or the browser, everything from the session is deleted from the computer.

Ironically, stripping the browser of any ability to store or send data makes for a smoother, speedier experience. But, as I found out, sites that heavily relied on cookies or scripts often didn’t work properly. But maybe it’s worth the hassle to have the peace of mind of knowing your personal data is protected.

Overall, Epic is a bit like all the good parts of Chrome in terms of look-and-feel, without the troubling security issues and lack of protection.

Enter Mobile

According to StatCounter, Chrome dominates the three-way desktop browser race with a 40 percent share of the market. IE comes in second at 28 percent, while Firefox lags with 18 percent.

But consumers are becoming frustrated with the browsing experience. As websites, and the Internet as a whole, get more bloated, browsers have become massive pieces of software themselves, with extensions, plug-ins and add-ons galore that turn once-simple, lightweight viewers into computers-within-computers.

Influences, though, are converging to kickstart innovation once again, making room for rivals beyond Google and Microsoft to enter the browser arena.

Despite the success with the Mac and iPod, Apple was never a major player in the browser wars until it released Safari in 2004. But with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and a lightweight, elegant version of its browser — ideal for cramped data and sometimes erratic mobile connections — Apple quickly gained a foothold in mobile browsing.

According electronics repair site Fixya, Safari is the most reliable of all the mobile browsers, perhaps because it famously doesn’t render Flash. Meanwhile, IE often rendered pages incorrectly, while Chrome displayed fonts poorly.

But as 3G, turns to 4G and 5G, and Android outpaces iOS around the world, Apple is losing its once-dominant position to Google. Whoever places more smartphones in the hands of more consumers will become the gatekeeper to the mobile Web, and influence the lucrative mobile ad market, as well as the aesthetics of the Internet itself.

It’s hard to say whether upstarts like Coast and Epic will chip away at the dominance of Microsoft, Google, Apple and Firefox. Those big companies have a huge head start, as well as the ability to control many areas of an ecosystem. But the upstarts are addressing key issues and concerns that have evolved as the Internet has grown from a Web of text into the mobile medium through which we do our work and get our entertainment.

Maybe they’ll spur the big companies to rethink and re-tool their existing products, or look at their designs with a fresh eye, but that depends of whether the next-generation of browsers can get much of an audience to begin with.

Meanwhile, it’s to our benefit, as consumers, to remember that using a browser doesn’t have to be a decision made on auto-pilot. When I browse the Internet these days, it’s usually on a smartphone or tablet. Firing up a site on a computer feels increasingly like a historical artifact. In a few years, it may likely be as antiquated as accessing AOL on a dial-up, but the browser has been around for some time, and the increasingly mobile nature of our experience will hopefully jumpstart its evolution into a surprising direction. ♦

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