Browser Wars: Mozilla vs. Safari vs. Internet Explorer

With Apple aggressively pushing Safari to Windows users who are running iTunes, and Mozilla and Opera releasing new versions of their popular browsers, it seems that the browser wars are hotting up once again.

Is a second browser war going to be a good thing or a bad thing for web users?

The current state of play is that Internet Explorer dominates the Web, commanding some 74 per cent. Following at a distant second is Firefox, with some 18 per cent market share. Safari holds some 6 per cent (hardly snapping at Firefox’s heels, despite Apple’s posturing), while Opera trails far behind with a 0.7 per cent market share.

Now Microsoft has dominated the browser market share for too many years, and the negative effects of this are obvious. Internet Explorer 7 is one of the worst browsers currently available. It’s slow, offers poor standards compliance, and it’s a serious memory hog , and nearly three-quarters of Web users have to suffer these problems daily. No matter how you crunch those numbers, that’s an awful lot of people getting a sub-standard browsing experience.

But now we have Mozilla and Apple (and to a much lesser extent, Opera) shaking things up. Testing I’ve done show that Firefox 3.0 is the fastest browser currently available. SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tests shows that Firefox 3.0 processes JavaScript ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7, while Opera offers the best CSS standards compliance (scoring 83 out of 100 in the ACID 3 test – a test in which Safari 3.1 scores 75, and Firefox 3.0 scores 71).

Mozilla is hoping that heavy promotion and publicity stunts such as their Download Day Guinness World Record attempt will encourage people to switch browsers. (Mozilla has also changed the Firefox install routine too, so that Firefox 3.0 becomes the default browser unless the user unchecks a box.)

Apple has taken a more aggressive approach, pushing Safari aggressively – though the company has backed down somewhat from how it originally pushed Safari onto users via Apple’s Software Updater program.

But do publicity stunts and aggressive push techniques really help Web users?

Well, Safari hasn’t turned out to be as secure a web browser as Apple had promised, so that tends to question the sanity of the company’s decision to push code so aggressively. For Apple, gaining market share seemed to be something the company was willing to do no matter what the cost.

While Mozilla’s Download Day is not an aggressive land grab but instead a voluntary drive, it still encourages millions of people to download, install and run code that hasn’t yet been properly battle tested. Some people are urging caution, which might be a wise thing given the hoopla surrounding this release.

Continued: IE dominance will be tough to challenge