Last week, Mozilla celebrated Firefox’s fifth birthday. While it may seem hard to believe that it’s really been that long since Firefox first burst onto the browser scene, it’s equally hard to understate just how important it has been for the development of the web. While IE is still the most popular browser, according to Net Applications, the browser market is much healthier than it was five years ago. Several major desktop and mobile browsers are in active development, notably IE, Firefox, the WebKit-based Apple Safari and Google Chrome, and Opera. The intense competition among these vendors is causing a climate of innovation, and the start of a new browser war.
So what might the future hold for browsers? In my latest Long View over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro, “What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?“, with comments from Chris Wilson (Microsoft), Chris Blizzard (Mozilla) and Bruce Lawson (Opera), I look at where this new browser war might lead, and the battlefields that it will be fought on: innovative new technologies, browser performance, security and privacy, and the ability to browse from multiple, diverse devices.
How do you think browsers will change over the next five years?
Two small pieces of recent Google news were just announced that merit a mention, since both have ramifications for web workers. First, Google has put a date on a Mac beta build of Chrome, meaning there’s finally an end in sight to one of the company’s most egregious oversights. Also, a new change to Google Wave should reduce inbox clutter, and maybe make it more usable for those finding it hard to adjust it (like me).
Let’s get to that great news first. While the “new” web browser has now been available for download to Windows users for over a year (the beta was first released last September), Mac users only recently got access to a stable developer’s build of Chromium, and that’s far from a release version of the software. Luckily, the new Mac beta is said to be on track for an early December release. Read the rest of this entry »
The browser war continues to rage unabated, with the end result being better products for us, the users. This past week has seen significant beta updates to my two favorite browsers: Chrome and Firefox. I’ve been playing with beta 1 of Mozilla’s Firefox 3.6. This new version of Firefox boasts improved performance, personas (the ability to easily switch between different skins for your browser), and updated support for web standards, including support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). Read the rest of this entry »
I’m a firm believer that most of the innovation in browsers is coming from the open-source players. This week brings a number of interesting developments from the browser arena, especially if you use either of the two most popular open source browsers: Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Firefox is slated to come out in a new version 3.6 next week, with several improvements, and I’m hoping it will iron out a few of the instabilities I’ve experienced in Firefox 3.5. Meanwhile, the Google Chrome team has announced a new collection of Artist Themes for enhancing your browser’s look. The themes come from a diverse list of well-known designers and artists, ranging from Dolce & Gabanna to pop star Mariah Carey. They’re very slick. And finally, the Arora browser, which is based on the open source WebKit rendering engine,is out in a new, cross-patform version that makes it especially easy to block ads.
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It’s an exciting time to be a web worker, what with all of the great browser choices we now have available to us. Firefox may be the preferred browser for many of us, but Chrome, Safari and Opera are also compelling options.
Despite these choices, I’ve pretty much been locked into either Firefox or Internet Explorer because of my reliance on the RoboForm password manager, which is only compatible with those browsers. The lack of Google Chrome support has been particularly frustrating to me. I’m impressed with the speed and resource management of Chrome, but without the easy access to my passwords that I’ve grown accustomed to, it hasn’t been an option for serious consideration. But a couple of recent announcments by Siber, the maker of Roboform, are changing that.
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This week brings several pieces of significant news on the browser front, about Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 8. As covered on the OStatic blog, Google has announced a new, stable version 3.0 of Chrome. It’s downloadable here, and if you’re already using it, you’ll get an automatic update. Meanwhile, Mozilla announced new tools, and Internet Explorer — which has been steadily losing market share, to Firefox in particular — bested all other browsers in an interesting set of tests.
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The Google Chrome browser has been in existence for a little over a year now, and has close to three percent market share, according to NetApplications. Many people attribute its relatively low market share thus far to lack of availability of finished Mac and Linux versions, as well as a lack of of the kinds of very useful extensions that are available for Firefox. On that last front, Google is taking a bold step forward, and making support for extensions turned on by default on versions of the browser obtained through the Dev channel, which anyone can subscribe to. The news was announced on the Chromium blog, and is a strong sign that a healthy ecosystem of extensions is on the way for one of the speediest and most innovative browsers.
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Google yesterday made “developer channel releases” (alpha versions) of my current favorite browser, Chrome, available for Mac and Linux. Beware — these releases are not suitable for day-to-day browsing, as they are likely to be unstable and lacking features. The Chromium blog even posts the warning, “[P]lease DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.” Issues include an inability to print, set the default search engine or alter the privacy settings. However, if you just want to play with Google’s blazingly fast browser and get a taste of what your Windows-owning friends have been raving about for the past few months, go ahead and try it out.
The Mac developer release is available to download here, while the Linux version is available here (requires Ubuntu 8.04 or Debian 5 or later. You’ll need to select the correct build depending on whether you have a 32- or 64-bit system).
Let us know what you think of Chrome for Mac/Linux in the comments.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
