
Earlier today, Google released its new browser, Chrome, from beta to its official release version. Opera 10 went into alpha stage last week, and Apple's Safari 4 is in development preview. Mozilla aims to have version 3.1 of its Firefox browser released early next year, as Microsoft plans to have Internet Explorer 8.
Since 2003, Internet Explorer has begun to wane from a 95% market share to less than 70% today, decreasing at a increasing rate. At its current pace, Internet Explorer will be under 50% browser saturation in less than three years, something it hasn't seen since 1998, when it began to win the first browser war (Eric Sink has an informative "war memoir" worth reading).
In recent months, we have seen large companies weighed down from their own hubris, too large to deftly maneuver toward a changing demographic (it may be too salient to suggest IE is the GM of browsers). At the Institute for Cyber Security, we test against multiple browsers, including those aforementioned, but what it means to be a browser today?
Google's Chrome has begun to abstract the physical medium of where an application runs, blurring the distinction between a symbolic link (shortcut) and a hyperlink, the desktop from the web cloud. Firefox made browser extension writing a breeze. Both have correctly focused on their JavaScript engines as it is no longer just for validating input. Opera and Firefox have made standards compliance a priority, from CSS and XHTMlL to SVG and other W3C standards.
IE8 will not have SVG support, and its CSS compliance will still be the weakest of its esteemed competition. It introduces new non-standard functionality such as web slices and XDR, instead of capitalizing on existing standards that provide the same functionality. Today, a Microsoft evangelist intimated that there is a hidden advantage to Internet Explorer: "It's harder to write apps for IE--so it's a harder market for competitors to get into". That might be a terrific PR spin on a truly hazardous weakness, but such pride belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the browser world and IE's place in it.
If the first browser war led to a superpower, then the second one may well lead to a balkanization, where no browser dominates so thoroughly. In this state of affairs, will continuing its status quo even during rapid user turnover and referring to its barrier to entry as a plus rather than a minus leave IE as a first among equals, or an also-ran?
Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu