For the past five years, the Web Browser world has been pretty quiet. Microsoft had decimated the competition and Internet Explorer was the unquestioned champion of browsing. Things have changed significantly in the last two years. Firefox has obtained a devoted following, including yours truly, and Opera has picked up market share as well. This year, there will be big changes in all three browsers. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 was just released, as was the first beta of Firefox 2.0, and Opera recently released Version 9.
Extremetech takes a look at all three.
For a long time, there was nothing to talk about in web browsers. You used Internet Explorer, and that was it. Oh, to be sure, some Mozilla/Netscape holdouts clung to their ways, as did a smattering of users of Opera, Konqueror, and other obscurities. Internet Explorer itself hasn’t had a major version change since the release of 6.0 in 2001, so there wasn’t much to talk about there, either for five long years.
That’s all changed, thanks to that phoenixlike incarnation of Netscape technology, Firefox. In one year, the open-source darling Firefox has pulled within a dead heat of browser the browser popularity crown, at least on the ExtremeTech site, where each browser claims just over 43 percent of our viewers. This spurred Microsoft to leave off its complacency, and serious development of the formerly dominant browser restarted in earnest.
My Sitemeter log only keeps track of 100 visitors at a time, but Firefox consistently shows up as the preference of between 35-40 percent of the visitors.
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July 19th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
I use explorer at work, but firefox at home. I love firefox and I hope it remains free and they keep up the good work.