It's been three years since we last reviewed the current state of the browser. Last time, we were keeping tabs on the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer civil war. That war is over and surprise - Microsoft won. Netscape's current usage can be measured in the low single digits. That's not to say that Internet Explorer doesn't have any competition. Other insurgents have risen to challenge Microsoft, and they are fairing better than Netscape did. Today, there are more browser options than ever. But there are really only three contenders to keep an eye on: Internet Explorer (of course), Firefox, and Safari.


I.E. has continued to be the most popular browser - by far. It accounts for more than 80% of all browser usage. Its market share is amazingly entrenched, especially considering how long it's been since its latest release (almost three years ago!). Microsoft just released a long-awaited beta of I.E. 7.0, but it won't be officially released until later this year. I'm not going to bother describing Internet Explorer's features since most of you are probably reading this in I.E. right now.


Firefox is a free, open source browser which, in some sense, flows from the legacy of Netscape. Whatever happened to Netscape anyway? Well, in 1998, AOL purchased Netscape and later released its core code to the open source community as "The Mozilla Application Suite." This open source code base is now used, in part, by many different browsers, including Firefox.

Firefox is an excellent browser, and it's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Without a doubt it is the preferred browser of professional web developers because of its strict standards compliance, helpful development tools, and robust JavaScript error reporting. From a user perspective, Firefox has a tabbing interface that allows one browser window to contain many websites. You can easily toggle between sites without having to open lots of browser windows. Additionally, the webpage find/search feature is brilliant. As you type in your search word, Firefox highlights words on the page that match, letter for letter. If there is no match, the search box turns red, and you hear a soft clicking sound as you type. You don't have to type in your full word, hit submit, and wait for a response to find out there are no matches. You can also have Firefox highlight every occurrence of a search term on the page.


Safari is Apple's excellent browser for the Macintosh. If you are a Mac user, this is the browser of choice. Internet Explorer isn't even an option, since the latest version of I.E. available for the Mac is the ancient 5.2.3 version (5.1.7 if you haven't upgraded to system X yet - are there any of you still out there?). Safari is an excellent browser, and it is very standards compliant. Safari adopted the same tab interface as Firefox, but not the cool search/find feature. The newest version of Safari, under Apple's new Tiger 10.4 operating system, has really great RSS features (we'll talk more about RSS in a future newsletter). Mac users tend to use Safari over Firefox because of its tight integration with other Mac applications (like email). From a development perspective, the only downside to Safari is that it is only available on the Mac. But since it's consistent with standards, supporting this browser is relatively easy (thank you, Apple!).   next >