Browser Wars : Who’s Fighting Who?

We do the best when we have a list. Geeks must be listy. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Flock are the major players. I am not including safari and camino on purpose as they serve Mac only. I call browsers like Safari and Camino as brandists, I stole that term from racists. Without much delay, let’s get into the war of the browsers.

For those who haven’t been geeks for long, Netscape Navigator is the oldest and first browser for the Windows OS. Netscape came into the picture in 1994 soon followed by Internet Explorer which was purchased from Spygate by Microsoft. The first browser war was between IE and Netscape. Both IE and Netscape incorporated their own extensions and technology. IE came with Cascade Style Sheets (CSS) and Netscape with Javascript Style Sheets (JSSS). CSS was considered superior to JSSS and became popular. Microsoft started integrating IE with Windows which shot up IE popularity over Netscape. In 1998 Netscape caved in and accepted CSS as a valid markup language.

Netscape went open source and started Mozilla. Although Mozilla was the original open source browser, their developers saw the need of a stripped down version of the Mozilla browser. They started another browser which eventually became firefox. With an excess of 25 million downloads within the first 100 days of its first release made firefox the most popular browser to have ever existed.

Opera was actually written in 1994 for a Norwegian phone company and it uses a different technology. It is not based off of NCSA mosaic code as IE and Netscape and gives Opera some unique features like page zoom, mouse gestures etc. Although Opera existed alongside bigwigs IE and Netscape, it was considered an underdog as it came attached with ads. The ads were taken off in 2005 bringing much delight to Opera users.

Flock browser is another by-product of Mozilla. It is called as a social browser as it interacts with social bookmarking websites like delicious, flickr and technorati.

So, the question in the ring is “Who’s fighting who?”

During the time of IE’s dominance, they drifted away from the standard to come up with their own. They still feel that their standards are better than the W3C. Designers even today have to write the code so it is in accordance with IE and other browsers. As a designer, I can tell you truthfully that there is not a single day that I cuss at IE. FYI, all the other browsers follow the standard. So, if you know that a piece of code works on Firefox, you can be absolutely sure that it would work on every other browser other than IE.

The standards being compared, the browser war should be fought on ethics. Browsers who follow standards against the browsers who make up their own standard. In real sense, it should be a war with IE on one side and the rest on the other.

But right now, it seems to be a war against each other. Flock is trying to steal Firefox users and vice versa and Opera is trying to steal Firefox users. It looks like Firefox is waging a lone battle with IE and all the other browsers don’t really know who their opposition is.

Related posts:

1. 7 Reasons not to Use IE
2. Google Chrome is the buzzword in the browser share market… Microsoft beware!!
3. Browser Speed Tests: Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4, Opera 10.5, and Extensions
4. New Web Browser That Ensures Privacy
5. People Can Steal Your Browser History : Watchout

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