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.

You’d think with the outbreak of the latest Internet browser war, companies like Microsoft and Mozilla would be doing everything possible to make their products competitive.

Microsoft announced that a flaw in Internet Explorer (IE) allowed hackers to redirected users to websites that would download malicious software designed to steal personal information such as user names and passwords onto users’ home computers.

Not surprisingly, the error was listed as critical, which resulted in some security companies calling for a boycott of IE until Microsoft released a patch to fix the flaw. I’ve never been a big fan of IE. In fact, I’ll only use it when I’m forced to, so I smugly sat there and gloated, confident that as a Firefox user I didn’t have to put up with the spreading panic.

Then karma turned around and bit me in the rear. Turns out earlier in the week Mozilla, the company that makes Firefox, issued a patch that fixed six critical flaws. Then Bit9, a US-based company that monitors security flaws, released a report of what it considers the top ten most vulnerable programmes.

Sitting at the top of the list was Firefox. IE didn’t even appear on the list. I was initially sceptical about Bit9’s results, but they make a good point. They based their report on a number of factors, including the number of critical bugs in the software, its overall popularity, and - here are the kickers - how easily updatable and supported the software was. Bottom line, IE is supported and patched by Micro-soft. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to browsers, I’ve tried them all and was really disappointed when Google released their Chrome for Windows only. I regularly switch between Firefox and the latest nightly build from Webkit (essentially Safari) right now. Firefox has the extensibility I rely on. I had hoped that Chrome would magically become my new go-to browser. Unfortunately, Chrome is not yet nearly as extensible as Firefox, and isn’t available for Mac (yet).

So imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon the latest experimental Firefox build from Mozilla, called Minefield. This Minefield should not be confused with the unofficial optimized builds of Firefox, which are also referred to as Minefield. Minefield is Mozilla’s code-name for this generation of Firefox, and the code name is used for unofficial builds to avoid infringing upon the Firefox name.

Now, what’s so special about the Mozilla Minefield build? It’s fast… smokin’ fast. This is essentially a version of Firefox with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine under the hood, and as Ars Technica reports, it tests even faster than Google’s V8 JavaScript engine.

As most Mac users have noted, Firefox is kind of pokey on the Mac platform, particularly compared with WebKit or even Safari, and even when compared with Firefox on a similarly spec’d Windows machine. Version 3 of Firefox was supposed to fix the performance problem, and while it’s somewhat better, it’s still not great. Read the rest of this entry »