Up until August, you had a choice of three or four Web browsers: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Safari 3.1 from Apple, and Opera 9.5. Broad-based usage statistics show that about 70 percent of the market belongs to the two most recent versions of Internet Explorer, and 20 percent uses some version of Firefox. Safari weighs in at about 5 percent and Opera gets a measly 1 percent. The remainder belongs to oddball browsers you’ve likely never heard of.
But yesterday, Google announced the “beta” release of a new Web browser called Chrome (ironically, Microsoft used the same name for a failed multimedia Web browser in 1999). In typical Google style, it introduced the product with a cool comic book (from Scott McCloud, author of the terrific Understanding Comics), which outlines the ideas that underlie Google’s entrance into the browser marketplace. Of course, “marketplace” is a misnomer, since all the browsers I mentioned above are free for the downloading. If you’re interested, you can download Google Chrome directly from www.google.com/chrome.
Why should you care about Google Chrome? If you read the 38-page comic (available at www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome), you’ll see that Google is focused on developing a browser that runs Web applications really well. This distinguishes Chrome from existing browsers, which were born in the “display a Web page” era, when sophisticated Web applications didn’t exist. Chrome’s primary goals are stability, speed and security, which is is sort of motherhood-and-apple-pie, since none of us like a browser that crashes, operates slowly or reveals personal information to the world at large.
But Google has taken a ground-up approach and, unlike Microsoft, it makes money from the Web experience (not from sales of Windows and Office). So it’s sure to be a contender, and if it can differentiate itself sufficiently from other browsers (as it did with the simplicity, speed and relevance of search), it’s entirely possible Chrome will become the dominant browser.
Of course, the leading edge of technology is probably not appropriate for your business. Obviously, someone in your organization should be following developments like Chrome, to decide when it does make sense to switch from whatever technology you’re using today. In technology, timing is everything: not too soon, to avoid the inevitable growing pains associated with almost any new technology, and not too late, when your competitors have already adopted a new technology and you have to play catch-up. So what browser should you be using today?
For the longest time, I’ve used whatever the current release of Internet Explorer (IE) happened to be. Why? Because it was “the standard.” Web designers and programmers would (in general) test their Websites using IE and be pretty sure a site would operate properly. From my perspective as a technologist, it’s also important to see how most people experience websites.
But the incredible growth of Firefox—which is more impressive when you consider that it doesn’t come pre-loaded on Windows (IE) or Macintosh (Safari) systems—led me to install Firefox 3 on my system (a 2-year old Toshiba laptop running Windows XP) and, more important, make it my default browser. The main reason is speed. While there’s some discussion about whether Safari or Firefox is faster, it’s clear that IE lags behind both. Of course, speed is immaterial if pages don’t display properly, but I’ve been very impressed with the fidelity of Firefox (my test used to be to look at the same page in both IE and Firefox, but after a while, it became moot, since both pages always looked the same). And no less an authority than Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal proclaimed Firefox 3 the “best browser for the Web” in his June 5, 2008, column (which you can find at http://ptech.allthingsd.com, along with a review of Google Chrome).
Should you change to Firefox, its producer, the Mozilla Foundation, has gone to great lengths to make the switchover as painless as possible. Firefox imports your existing IE favorites (which are called “bookmarks” in the Firefox world) and ensures your common keystrokes (like F5 to refresh a page or Ctrl-F to search on a page) work as expected. Installation is about as easy as I can imagine. Of course, using any new tool to best effect always requires investing a little effort. And that’s really my point: if you spend as much time in your browser as I do, it makes sense to use the best tool available. And since installing Firefox won’t conflict with IE (and you don’t have to make it your default browser), you can (and should) try out new tools (perhaps after waiting until others say that it’s worthwhile). On the other hand, if you don’t use a browser much, then maybe the improvement offered by a new browser isn’t worth the effort. But, hey, be bold and see for yourself.
You should also know that Microsoft isn’t sitting still. It recently made a second so-called “beta release” of Internet Explorer 8 available for download and review (just Google “ie8 beta” if you’re interested). There are a bunch of new features, including what Microsoft calls “InPrivate” browsing (others call it “porn mode”), in which the sites you visit are not added to the browser’s history, so no one can see where you’ve been. It also claims performance improvements, but I haven’t seen any concrete metrics for the end-user experience. It can be hard to tell how an increase of 80 percent in loading script files actually affects your experience of a page that includes that script. Still, combined with the fact that Microsoft has the majority of the desktop market, it will probably be enough to maintain its browser dominance, unless Google Chrome really uncorks something people can’t live without.
Google Chrome points to the fact that the Web is becoming a platform (like Windows) for applications, and the modern-day programmable browser is both the interface and engine for that platform. It’s a safe bet that we haven’t seen the end of the browser wars.
