History

You must have heard about this or read about this. Well it is some word coined by the media to describe the competition between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer in early 2000′s. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 (IE6) is dubbed, final nail in Netscape Navigator’s coffin. After IE6, the scene was pretty much silent with IE6 ruling the roost with over 90% market share (including Macintosh).  Opera had it’s own share and no major competitor to was on the scene for IE6.

Enter Safari (Jan ‘03) and Mozilla Firefox (Nov ‘04). While Safari was primarily targeted at uprooting Microsoft’s hold on Macintosh platform, Firefox was a open source project targeted at improving the web experience for users, an it succeeded big time! It got Microsoft working, which slipped into a slumber on development of a new browser. By the time Microsoft woke up to the new challenge in the browser arena and readied IE7, Firefox already developed a huge following and chipped about 12% of market share, therefore successfully initiating the browser wars yet again.

Today

Today IE is at 72%, Firefox enjoys about 20% of market share, Safari (sneaked into most of Windows systems through Apple software update) is at about 6% and Opera a humble 1%. Read in more detail about the percentage shares at this Wikipedia article.

The browser wars today have reached it’s peak with a new entrant, Google Chrome. Google has launched its new browser built on top of Webkit framework used also by Apple Safari. It is a instant hit with the Google fans and is yet to woo hardcore Firefox fans. Chrome is a little more than browser, it is sort of an Operating system which is optimized for all Google Web Apps, try running any Google applications on it and you will agree.

On a feature to feature basis, IE8 and Chrome almost match each other. Safari and Firefox have almost every feature and just lack the crash control (which they claim they will never require )

Do a quick search with the title of this article and you will have a bunch of articles, giving their own views on what’s better and what’s not. I am not going to go into all those details for you. As I believe you can test for yourself and decide.

For now, I run all of the above and give them their respective share of my CPU time

Happy surfing.

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