Winning Small Battles in the Browser Wars

Mosaic Browser Logo credit: CSA/University of Illinois

The Browser wars are heating up again after years of only minor scrimmages and few battles.

The original browser wars of the 90′s was between the giant Netscape and the well-funded challenger Microsoft Internet Explorer. The questions asked then was had Microsoft lost the Internet or would they be able to come from behind and create a credible challenge against Netscape’s market dominance.

When the dust from that battle cleared, Netscape was gone, having been acquired by AOL and Microsoft Internet Explorer has remained the leading browser for a decade. Microsoft IE, as it’s often called, reached it’s highest strength in the middle of this decade. It has steadily lost some of its domination to Mozilla Firefox, an open source browser, owing some of it’s past support, if not code, to Netscape. By May 2009, Firefox had gained 22.5% of the browser market after IE.

Recent years have seen gains by Apple’s Safari browser, originally on Macs and then last fall, another open source browser, this time in conjunction with Google.  An always credible, but lightly used on desktops entry has been the Opera browser which is used more widely on mobile devices.

Each browser has it’s own niche, Firefox makes effective use of “plug-ins” to add functionality, Internet Explorer works best on certain websites that employed Microsoft web software for building pages and since it’s bundled with Windows it is the default choice for Windows user, as Safari is on the Mac — Opera is more of a suite of Internet products including browser, email and newsreaders in the old style of Netscape,

Over the last 15 years of the Internet, the job of the browser has changed dramatically from being like a slide projector that retrieves and displays static images to today, when many applications that are used on computers are really services (read programs) that run in a browser.  These services tend to be written in a scripting language called Javascript, so the faster your browser can run Javascript, the faster is your browser.

With the release of Google Chrome, the battleground for browsers became speed, since Chrome was indeed very very speedy and Internet Explorer, by comparison, was very very slow.  Chrome achieves it’s speed by using a very fast processing engine for running its Javascript.

Firefox has spent a year readying a new update to its Version 3 browser that promises a new Java engine speedier than its current. Apple Safari has recently released Version 4 which they call, though can’t necessarily prove (or to be more accurate, since browsers do so many different functions, any browser-make can find something to measure in their product which is the fastest), “The World’s Fastest Browser.”

I wanted to take a look at what kind of user was tending to use which browser and how the browsers were doing at competing, so I looked at the current month statistics for three sites to which I have access, this one, Enquiring Mimes, Sansanpups.com, a dog/pet blog written by Sandra and Win4Lin, a Linux software product site owned by Virtual Bridges.   All sites do fairly well as far as hits and page views and have similar levels of traffic.

What immediately seems interesting is that while the competition for browsers is considered to be overall a race between IE and Firefox, when you look at specific user profiles, the results vary.

Sansanpups, the most general purpose of our websites with maybe the least techie users, does indeed use Internet Explorer over any other browser, but these are people who read blogs, that’s makes them a little more advanced as useres right there, so Firefox runs a good race with a 25% share. Chrome and Safari are neck and neck with around 10% each.

For the Linux software site, probably being open source and available on Linux, Firefox has more than 50% share, but with still a sizable share is IE at 30%. The Linux-crowd has little interest in Safari (not available on Linux or Chrome, not yet available on Linux), but really not that much more interest in Konqueror, a Linux-only browser.

Now you, dear readers, and I’m proud of you, for it, are the most adventuresome, putting the leading browsers behind you and mostly using using Chrome and Safari, the two fastest browser almost tied around 25% apiece. Also, admitting my own prejudice as I have in the past, these are my two favorite browsers because of their speed.

Future of the Browser War? Expect to continue to see much emphasis on browsers as a means of dominating the conversation between the big-software-three Microsoft, Google, Apple and the open source Firefox, with continued innovations by Opera.