HitChrome

2009 will be another year where internet browsers will compete for market share.

The past year has seen some exciting changes in the browser market with at least one new player giving the market a shake and an old competitor still battling away with its latest release.

In theory the browser market is commoditised. There is not much money to be made from building a new browser, no matter how good it is. At least that is the theory. But the past year has shown that the browser wars are still in full swing. It’s just that now the stakes are even higher and even non-traditional browser makers are getting in on the act.

A few months ago we got a taste of that as Google released beta versions of its Chrome browser. Although it only worked on Windows machines at launch time, Chrome quickly made its presence felt. Within days of its release there were reports of webmasters seeing more than 2% of their traffic coming from Chrome users and the W3C now pins Chrome’s market share at 3.1%. Which is impressive in a market where after years of competing Opera Software has just 2.3% market share.

It also good news for Google, who clearly is hoping that building a browser optimised for its own online applications will make it a worthy competitor against the likes of Microsoft who has been a little slow coming to market with an online offering.

Microsoft, on the other hand, looks unlikely to release its latest browser, Internet Explorer 8, before the second quarter of 2009. Although it has been in beta for the best part of the year, Microsoft now says that a final beta will be issued in the early part of 2009.

Unfortunately, this could be a little too late for Microsoft. Its competitors are getting stronger by the day and by early 2009, Chrome will be out of beta, Firefox will have racked up millions of new users and Opera will have released its version 10 browser.

While Microsoft spent the best part of 2008 releasing test versions of its IE8 browser - the first beta was in March - its competitors have been streaking ahead.

In fact, in the time that Microsoft has taken to iron out last-minute problems in IE8 and finish its testing, there are even more browser competitors in the market.

Google, for example, released its Chrome browser as a beta version in early September and just three months later released version 1.0 of the browser. Sure, Chrome doesn’t have half the features that IE8 does, or even Firefox 3, but that hasn’t harmed it. According to NetApplications, Chrome already had close to 1% share of the browser market by November and with version 1.0 being released in December that number is expected to climb even higher.

Firefox, in comparison, topped 20% market share for the first time in November 2008. That’s up from around 16% in January of 2008. Similarly, Apple’s Safari browser is up from 5% in January 2008 to more than 7% in November.

Internet Explorer’s market share has dropped from 75% at the start of 2008 to 69% on November. Which is not an encouraging trend for Microsoft.

When Internet Explorer 8 is finally released in early 2009, no doubt there will be a spike in users who, because they are prompted to update their versions, will switch to the newer browser. And most will be happy with what is essentially the best browser Microsoft has released to date.

But if the company delays the final release too much longer it could be looking at a completely different browser landscape in which it will have much more competition that ever before.