Serious competition in the web browsing market

Once upon a time, browsing the Internet was simple. You had Internet Explorer pre-installed into Windows 98, and if you were an ‘old timer’ who knew a bit about early browsers you would have tried the now defunct Netscape Navigator.

But, as the Internet energized the worldwide development community to cooperate to produce open source applications, Mozilla Foundation evolved, Firefox emerged, and the real choice we’ve had every since then has been either IE or Firefox.

Not forgetting, of course, the ‘boutique’ browsers like Opera- mainly a hit on mobile phones and gaming devices- and Apple’s Safari which has recently also become available for Windows PCs.

Anyway, let’s focus on the big two, which have just become a big three.

Why? Well, because Google has decided to launch a browser!
When Google enters any market, it’s big news and quite worrying for competitors.

With it’s Internet browser, Chrome, it seems Google wants to serve users with even more. So, it seems the web browser, a very important application you’re using everyday, is now getting the competition it deserves. Your Web browser is probably the most important program on your computer, and it’s now getting the competition it deserves.

Mozilla Firefox is outstanding and thoroughly deserves it’s market position as Microsoft’s real challenger, now accounting for nearly a quarter of the worldwide browser market.

Microsoft is not sitting still, as you would expect, especially with the upcoming release of IE’s new version. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 looks good.
Now, to look at the ‘new kid on the block’, Google Chrome (http://google.com/chrome) is now available for Windows XP and Vista, as Google says it’s working on Mac and Linux versions.

Within a week of it’s launch, Chrome grabbed 1% of the browser market, and continues to attract users.

Apart from the “InPrivate browsing” feature, which lets you visit sites without the browser keeping any record of your activity there, there’s little that Chrome offers which the other browsers don’t.

In fact, it comes up short in comparison. It’s just too simple, at least at this stage of it’s development. You an count on Google to fix this, and challenge both IE and Firefox, and this can only be good news for users.

zanasser@gmail.com