Browser Wars Return

Remember the browser wars of 1999?  (Netscape against Internet Explorer, anti-trust suits, etc.)  Get ready for a little déjà vu.

With its primary competitor defeated, Microsoft waited five years to announce an upgrade to IE in 2006.  But since 2003, the the non-profit Mozilla Foundation has used the open-source model of innovation to continually add improvements to its Firefox browser, improvements which were copied in due course by IE (tabbed browsing, for example).

By now, Firefox has an 18% market share worldwide and is preparing for the launch of Firefox 3.0 (download the public preview release now here).  Microsoft is expected to release an Internet Explorer 8 this year, Apple is promoting its Safari browser for Windows PC’s, and new start-ups are entering the field.

Why all this interest in the humble web browser?

An enormous shift is underway to web services: more and more, software and even hardware will be delivered through “cloud computing” on the web.  Think “Google Docs spreadsheets,” rather than running MS Excel on your laptop.  Or, “Salesforce.com” rather than contact management software licenses.  The future is cloudy for software license businesses like the enormously profitable Microsoft Office suite.  Even hardware is disappearing into a cloud, as Amazon.com and others offer server space and data storage remotely (read about Jeff Bezos' big move in Wired).

So with more and more business models moving to the web “cloud,” expect increased competition to offer the browser that provide the entry point for all that business.

(image from my.opera.com)

UPDATE 2008.06.06: Future Tense (American Public Media) news analyst Dwight Silverman weighs in that Firefox 3 is "hands down, the best browser." Hear the podcast.

Comments

[r4i card]

Mozila Firefox is the best according to me because it's provide the best browsing functionality as well as it's has more useful function inside the browser..