Browser Wars over?

Administrator, 4 September, 2008

We thought the browser wars were over years ago, but there has been a quiet revolution taking place during recent years with Firefox and Opera showing the way with more functionality and closer standards compliance. That, and better support for CSS has set them apart from Internet Explorer. And recently Apple have joined the scrap by releasing Safari for Windows.

More recently, Firefox 3 with its tabs, tagged bookmarking and 'awsome bar' has set the standard and now Microsoft, fighting on several fronts, are desperately trying to consolidate their long-held monopoly with IE8 (beta 2 here).

If you have nothing better to do (or even if you have) you may just prefer to view the 20 minute promotional video. Mostly it's tighter integration with Microsoft products, like Live Search and a poor attempt to catch up with Firefox's 'awesome bar' - but curiously, they have not copied the bookmarking.

The biggest innovation is what the trade has dubbed 'Porn Mode'. Now isn't that just what you've been waiting for?

If all this is not exciting enough, we now have Google squaring up to Microsoft with another open source application, Google Chrome.

Of course, there is much more to this new war than who can build the best browser. If Google - long time supporters of Mozilla - had just wanted to put IE in the shade they could have just increased their investment in Firefox. Google have already ammassed a vast amount of data on our search behaviour and Chrome will take this to a new level.

Exciting times!