Who's Winning the New Browser Wars?

Image by Sam Cornwell via Flickr

Who's winning the new browser wars? We are. By "we," I mean consumers.

Just look at the stuff that has happened in the last couple of years. We've got a mature Safari, based on WebKit and the Squirrelfish engine, running just about as fast as any browser. Chrome is also based on WebKit but uses a completely new JavaScript engine named V8, and it blows the doors off of just about everything else. Firefox has hit 3.0 and now 3.5, with improved Gecko rendering and Spidermonkey / Tracemonkey keeping the browser competitive and all the extensions keeping it attractive to large numbers of users. Even IE has bumped up a couple of versions to 7 then 8, and there's no reason to call it a pig, either. (Oops, I forgot Opera Unite!)

Just imagine what we would have had in 2004 if IE hadn't won the original browser wars and sat at version 6 and 95% of web traffic for five years.

Competition benefits the cunsumer.

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