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.