As of this post, Internet Explorer (IE) has 73% of the market place, Mozilla’s Firefox has 19%, and Apple’s Safari has 6%. Whether or not Firefox is a credible threat to IE is still debatable, but it has been gaining in popularity over the last few years. However, with the recent announcements of Internet Explorer 8 and Google’s Chrome browser, it looks like the browsers wars are back in full force.
Both Chrome and IE8 provide better support for Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and mark a new era in cloud computing. The interesting thing about this war, is that many of the benefits of Chrome and IE8 are hidden from the user. This opens more questions than it answers: Will users adopt these new browsers if they can’t SEE the benefits? Will new RIAs be able to take advantage of the new browser’s capabilities while still supporting other browsers?
As someone in the trenches, it’s hard to see how this will pan out. But I’m definitely intrigued by how the post-war world wide web will look.
11/4/09 UPDATE: I just saw a commercial for google Chrome while watching Heroes on Hulu. A commercial for a browser, I didn’t expect that when I wrote this article.
