The new browser war: Have you chosen sides?
By Arun R. Zaheeruddin • Nov 4th, 2009 • Category: Technology • 7 CommentsI was shocked when a group of young adults came walking past me, and although I knew I had the right attire to blend in and the right attitude, they could still sniff me out from amongst their midst. This was the scene at an event I invited myself to at my University. Three years seemed a lot of time. I hadn’t been to the place in that long, and somehow as I entered the doors to the main enclosure, nostalgia came racing back into my thoughts.
If you are, like me, old enough to remember the “era of the browser wars”, you would be delighted to know that it wasn’t over there and then - it still continues to this day. In the olden days, when browsers were the next big thing - Netscape was the foremost browser vendor with their Navigator browser. To contend with the browser, stood up the Internet Explorer team. Much like the cold war, technological enhancements to one browser were a serious blow to the other. Until funnily enough, the browser that came out victorious was the Internet Explorer. Masses on the World Wide Web made Internet Explorer their first choice - only because IE was the browser with the most to offer. Netscape Navigator was never to be seen again, and the code for the same was released to the public domain in its aftermath. The employees at Netscape began looking at other ways of creating Internet software - development they kept under wraps.
Internet users are thick. They do not care what browser to use, they just happen to click the blue ‘e’ symbol and viola, they have Internet. It wasn’t until the new millennium kicked in and the Y2K problem posed a question to the masses - “Is our software keeping our data safe?” By the time, people realised this, they had already been creating more data per day per user than the whole world was a few thousand years from then. Turned out, Internet Explorer was the number one choice for hackers and trojan scripts to get inside your computer. Microsoft knew about the problem but moved steadily, vowing in minds to fix the problem with the release of Windows XP. While Microsoft sheepishly continued to ignore the problem, the Netscape team had came up with a new secret weapon - the Mozilla Suite. Based on most of the structural code for Netscape Navigator, they released the Mozilla Browser - which would later be called Mozilla Firefox.
Firefox slowly and steadily stepped up to take a huge chunk of the market-space back from IE, although it took it almost half a decade to take just a meagerly 40-46% share. But now, with the release of the Mozilla Firefox 3.6 browser, the browser vendor has plans of finally toppling over the leading Internet Explorer and get the most share. With support for features like HTML5 and CSS, other browsers are eating up Microsoft’s majority browser market share. Internet Explorer isn’t doing much to help it’s status either. Perhaps, like Netscape, it is just waiting for the right moment to strike again. History is in the making here - what side are you on?
Trackback URL
|
|
|
Click For More Articles By Arun R. Zaheeruddin
All posts by Arun R. Zaheeruddin
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Firefox is the only choice for techies. In fact, various free plugins like FireBug, FireFTP and many others make it ideal for both technical and non-technical people
The first evolution of open source netscape was not firefox. It was the Mozilla Internet Suite. It consisted of a browser, an email client and a WYSIWYG website editor.
Firebird came later as a standalone browser. Firebird used to be the less stable than the suite and was considered more bleeding edge. However it proved more popular than the suite and hence overshadowed it. Later they changed the name to firefox because of trademark concerns.
The Mozilla foundation gave up developing the Mozilla suite and instead passed it on to other open source developers who continue to work on it. Today its called the seamonkey internet suite and you can download it from http://www.seamonkey-project.org.
So the reality is that netscape evolved into mozilla internet suite which later forked off into firefox.
@Talha: The facility to add plugins to the user-interface of the browser is what makes it apart from all the browsers. The Fennec browser (Firefox for mobile devices) has the same capabilities. Read this for the enhancements made to the browser: http://verticaltangent.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/whats-new-in-mozilla-firefox-3-6/
@Pakistani-Blogger: That is pretty much what the article says.
I love Firefox. I love the Add-ons, I love how I can customize it to my requirements.
I gave up on Explorer because it kept crashing and on my new laptop I upgraded to IE 8 hoping it was a new upgrade and much better and stable.
It crashed again !
I use my Firefox, open 20-30 tabs at one time and never feel the CPU slowing down and affecting the Cache…IE not only slows down but crashes immediately.
Firefox is the people’s browser.
Hi,
I am not a TeCHIE but i found that GOOGLE CHROME is now the fastest and slimmest browser.Most of the bugs it had been resolved. Try it.IE8 is good but comes with lot of baggage like bing etc.
i first used firefox on a very slow worldcall wireless connection when my IE would not even open up google properly and i became a fan of it.its ease of use its functionality and excellent speed were my reasons for becominga firefoxaholic but now thats changed .Firefox has lost innovation and chrome is the new firefox whether anybody agrees ot not.its hip user interface places and speed and ease of use(all of which put frefox at the top)make it teh umber one browser.Firefox needs a major re do both in terms of speed and user interaction if it wants users like me to stay loyal to t.
firefox my choice…but crash problem in firefox is very disgusting….