The Browser Wars

There's a war raging, and you're looking at the battlefield right now. Your web browser is your window onto the internet, but do you actually notice it? If not, it's time to start paying attention, because there are big changes afoot. How we browse, what we use, and where it's heading are all up for grabs.

Almost everyone who uses the internet looks at it using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. But it wasn't always so. When the web was young the dominant browser was Netscape Navigator. Current browser overlords Microsoft actually only got in on the act in late 1995. They were playing catch-up, but their aggressive tactics meant they eventually exterminated Navigator in what became known as The Browser War.

Victory?

Although of course that should now be amended to The First Browser War. Internet Explorer's hegemony is in serious trouble, and Microsoft seem to have been caught resting on their laurels. As recently as 2003 they announced that they were canceling further development of IE. They had beaten all opposition, so why keep trying? The browser that was left standing at the end of first war would reign supreme.

What they didn't count on happening was for their old foe to go underground and mutate.

Netscape released the source code of their tired old warrior to the open source community in 1998. It's new name would be Mozilla, and it simmered in the background, attracting a small but hardcore following. It was completely rewritten and morphed into many forms, but by far the most successful has been a project originally code-named Phoenix . Renamed as Firebird it was a lean and funky animal. By 2004 it was ready for full release into the wild, bearing its now-familiar name: Firefox.

Open Source

Internet Explorer was guided by the needs Microsoft, a massive and unwieldy technocracy. Firefox was developed as an open source project. That means a lot of good things. Firstly that the end user was much closer to the design process. Secondly, it was developed for use across different operating systems, securing geek chic. Thirdly it was designed to be stable and safe, two things Microsoft have never managed to get right. And last but not least: its free, with no strings attached.

Being open source software means that bedroom codemonkeys can build upon the basic product. As well as several customised versions of the basic Firefox, there are hundreds of plugins available for it. In practice most users have several installed. Users can pick and mix them based upon their needs and browsing habits.

Damage Control

Firefox has quickly taken a large bite out of Internet Explorer's market share. Users seem to be ready for more than Bill Gates was offering them. Microsoft is taking the attack seriously and has restarted development of Internet Explorer, recently releasing IE7. It's perhaps no surprise that the principle changes introduced in IE7 were the exact same features that most easily distinguished it from Firefox. Web designers and technogeeks point out that the new version actually fixes very few of the technical flaws present in IE6. It's damage control. A cosmetic dressing to stop the haemorrhaging of millions of IE users.

Of course, this criticism ignores the fact that if browser hostilities hadn't broken out again millions would still be browsing on the even weaker IE6. Once more an open source project has forced the big corporations to up their game.

For us little people, this war has to be a good thing.

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