The heated up clashes have always been a part of browser market, since late 1990’s — when browser war prevailed between Netscape’s Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). IE has been clear winner since then, but Success isn’t permanent. Finally Google chrome has taken over IE, chrome with 35.72% market share leaves behind IE with 31.23 % market share, according to StatCounter.
Firefox and chrome were always fierce rivals of IE, but chrome seems to have got better of IE this time. While IE and Firefox are on a constant decline, Chrome is constantly increasing its user base. Chrome’s prerendering feature makes it the fastest browser in the market. Its performance in java script, its minimalistic look and the speed certainly makes it beloved amongst users. Chrome also provides user with apps through its Chrome web store, which indeed is an invaluable offering to the user. Synchronization of bookmarks using Gmail account is also a worthwhile feature, using this, user can have their bookmarks saved—which then can be accessed from any other computer
Mozilla Firefox was users favorite (apart from IE), had 31.64% market share in January 2010. Since then, to tackle the fierce competition they started releasing multiple updates, active bug fixes rather frequently. Updates were released nearly in every six weeks. These frequent updates made Firefox to slip away from users’ grip. However, apart from a lagging UI, it has a very sound extensive plug-in ecosystem — which was users sweetheart. It definitely kicks off, when we talk about conserving memory. New launches of Firefox have been quite a performer (17.0.1 and 18.0 beta version), but it’s difficult to get back users trust now.
Microsoft’s IE is on a continuous decline, today it’s user base is not even half of what it used to be four years ago( from 68.14% in November 2008 to 31.23 % in November 2012).It might lag on UI and speed but it’s a Top-notch when it comes to hardware acceleration which helps with JQuery and AJAX heavy sites. You can even pin websites to taskbar and get notification.
However, Microsoft has already released latest IE version 10 to beat the heat. Clubbed with Windows 8, IE 10 could enforce users to stick with the browser leader – if ever users find value addition with all growing technology needs. But, enterprises’ cold approach towards Windows 8 could play a spoil sport for IE 10; Only 33% wants to migrate. Therefore the success of IE is largely depending on the performance of IE 10, which is turn pegged to Windows 8 growth in the market.
With all such new development and many more pending improvements and versions, it will be interesting to witness the “Tug of war” among all major browsers.
