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.

Why Google thinks we need a new browser

The Chrome developers say that all of the current browsers were invented before web services and with the new way people use the web it’s time for a modern browser for today’s web they said they emphasized speed, stability and security.  Their intention was to design Chrome using a minimalist approach wherein you don’t have to think about the browser or even see it that much, the emphasis is on the web page.

There is truth in this, today’s AJAX and Web 2.0 applications use plenty of a technology called javascript, here the developers say they tore apart the javascript engine and rebuilt it for speed.

What Chrome does

We’ve taken a look at Google Chrome and found some interesting features:

• One box for everything — there is no separate search, bookmarks or history box.  Just type in the one entry box and Chrome will search for you or offer alternatives from you bookmarks or sites you’ve already visited.
• When you install Chrome it will import your bookmarks and passwords from Firefox or Internet Explorer so you’re good to go when you start using Chrome.
• Instead of the usual download manager window, Chrome shows downloads at the bottom of the screen while they are downloading.
• Google Chrome includes an interesting feature that we’ve been seeing lately in utilities and next generation browsers — the ability to create mini-applicatiions out of web sites for the kinds of sites you might keep open all day — for me, Gmail.  The mini-app gets it’s own desktop shortcut and looks more like a regular application than a browser.
• When you open a new tab, the first page you see is a favorites page that has been built by Chrome of the pages you most often visit.
• The tabs are dynamic and their position can be moved around.  You can also move tabs between windows and pull a tab off of one window and make it a new window of its own.
• From an internal perspective, each tab runs independently of other tabs so that it something bad happens(like the website causes the browser to crash) to one tab it won’t effect other tabs or cause Chrome to crash.
• Since each tab is separate, Chrome gives you a nice feature called the Task manager that lets you see the status of each tab and optionally shut one down if it’s using too much of your computer’s resources.
• A browser window can be opened “Incognito” which means no records are kept of where you search in that window — let’s face it, that kind of behavior is called Porn-mode in other browsers  — it “protects your privacy”.
• Google Chrome starts up quickly and is fairly fast at displaying web pages.  When it reopens, it remembers your tabs from your last session.
• Chrome makes use of Google Gears which allows many web sites to be used when you’re offline.

Google Chrome is fully open source so you won’t be tied to any operating system or, eventually, platform.

Our Verdict?