The Browser Wars: 2006

Well, as we’ve been expecitng now for the past couple of years, the latest battle in the ongoing Browser Wars is upon us.
In the Blue corner, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0. Now with a improved rendering engine, tabbed browsing, feed support and all the goodies that the opponent has had for years.

In the Red corner, Firefox 2.0. The open-source contender; risen from the ashes of Netscape. Featuring a new interface, improved feed support and built in spell checking.

And I’m actually impressed by both of them.

IE has taken a dramatic leap forward. Finally the built-in Windows browser has escaped the ’90′s and has a rendering engine capible of more than basic CSS. It behaves more consistently with more standards-compliant browsers and for web-designers it is going to make our jobs easier (once the concentration of IE6 users falls significantly at least).

Firefox, on the web-design side of things hasn’t changed much, but as far as the end-user is concerned it is more polished and should help with further increasing its installed user-base – especially further into mainstream usage.

This battle has been more quiet than previous battles and may actually help to push this section of the industry forward in a positive way.

Related Links:

  1. IE7 Homepage
  2. Firefox 2.0 RC3 Homepage

3 Comments

  1. Posted 25 October 2006 at 10:42 am | Permalink

    It looks like IE and Firefox will now basically be exactly the same browser… except one will be owned by Microsoft.

  2. Posted 25 October 2006 at 12:43 pm | Permalink

    I just downloaded Firefox 2. The built in spell checker is a great tool, especially since I post on a lot of forums!

  3. Posted 29 November 2006 at 3:35 pm | Permalink

    I d/l ie 7 as well. It’s similar but after using Firefox for so long it’s a bit hard to get used to. Seems a bit too fussy for me.