Seeing is believing
The world of Web browsers is once again a hotbed of innovation and competition. Microsoft, which develops Internet Explorer, and the Mozilla Corporation, which makes Firefox, are both readying big updates to their market-leading browsers.
For years after Microsoft defeated Netscape in the Web browser wars of the late 1990s, browser innovation just about died. The hegemony of Internet Explorer (IE), which Microsoft bundled with its Windows operating system, saw to that. In the absence of competition, Microsoft all but abandoned development of IE.
Yet, today, thanks mainly to Firefox, an open-source browser born out of the ashes of the now-defunct Netscape, competition is not only alive and well but has forced Microsoft to reconstitute its IE development team and, even more significantly, to promise to play nicely by adopting open Web standards.
Firefox, developed by the Mozilla Corporation, is an open-source browser that has captured more than 15% of the worldwide market. This is despite the fact that Microsoft continues to bundle IE with Windows — since 2002, when IE’s share of the market peaked at over 90%, the Microsoft browser’s market share has been in steady decline.
Now Mozilla is readying the biggest update to Firefox in years. The next version, 3.0, is in the final stages of beta testing and the final version should be available within a couple of months. I’ve played around with the fourth beta, or test release, and despite a few bugs (to be expected in a beta), the new version is lightning-fast at rendering Web pages. Independent tests confirm that Firefox 3.0 will be the fastest browser available. The biggest speed improvement appears to be in so-called Web 2.0 applications, such as Google Docs, the online office suite. Gmail, Google’s Web-based e-mail application, also seems much more responsive than it is under Microsoft’s browser or older versions of Firefox.
Version 3.0 also has a sexy new interface designed to integrate better with whatever operating system you’re using. On Mac OS X, the browser looks more like Apple’s Safari rival, and that’s no bad thing. On Windows XP, the browser adopts the green and blue theme used in the Microsoft operating system.
Early reports suggest that the memory problems that have plagued some users of Firefox have also been fixed.
The new version should help Firefox continue making slow but steady market share gains against IE. If its growth trajectory is maintained, almost one in five Web users will choose Firefox as their primary browser by the end of the year. Already, in Europe, Firefox has captured almost 30% of the market, according to research by XiTi Monitor.
But Microsoft is not going down without a fight. In an apparent new spirit of openness, Microsoft has promised to comply with open standards. Web developers will tell you they have to make substantial changes to the code that displays their websites in order to accommodate IE, which simply does not conform to open standards. But sceptics question whether Microsoft is serious about embracing Web standards or whether it is simply trying to appease European Union regulators.
With IE version 8, which should be released later this year, Microsoft will incorporate three modes for displaying websites. There’ll be a new, default, standards-compliant mode. It will also have an older IE 7 rendering engine for websites designed for the current-generation Microsoft browser, and a third mode for displaying older websites.
But, as Hakum Wium Lie, chief technology officer at Norwegian browser developer Opera Software, said in a recent interview with News.com: “[Microsoft has] a long record of saying the right things while doing something different. It remains to be seen what their products look like when they ship.”
First published as the column Technology & You in the Financial Mail
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