Prompt's TechBlog
Up from the depths, thirty storeys high!
Breathing fire, its head in the sky - Mozilla!
16 May 2006
Posted by Dave WilbyFirefox is gaining in popularity every day, while Internet Explorer is suffering from the extensive gaps between revisions Microsoft chooses to bestow on its users. Of course, it remains to be seen just how fickle us Firefox fans will be when IE 7 hits at the end of the year (Vista delays permitting), complete with tabbed browsing and numerous other frills 'borrowed' from open source developers.
OneStat.com does concede that IE continues to dominate overall, with 85.17 per cent of the global market in May, shrinking by 0.65 percent since January (source: ZDNet UK). Firefox support has swollen by 0.56 per cent over the same period. Firefox 2.0 is currently in Alpha 2 release with a final version expected in the Autumn, sneaking a significant jumpstart on IE 7.
So, do you stick by your chosen breed of Windows browser through thick and thin? Or are you happy to chop and change from IE to its rivals as the feature set lead changes hands?
Please share your tales of loyalty and betrayal with us all!
tags: mozilla | browser wars
Comments:
According to this, tabbed browsing was introduced in 1997 by commercial product Netcaptor and was only later popularised by the open source movement. Also, to be fair, I think Microsoft has contributed quite a few ideas to the pool that open source draws upon, and it doesn't seem unreasonable for that to cut both ways and for Microsoft to be inspired by (or to just take, depending on your view) some ideas that came to prominence in open source first.
Oh, and another thing: there's a fair bit of similarity between the way Windows organises applications on the start bar (introduced 1995) and the way that tabs are used to access different windows in a browser (introduced 1997). Depending on how much innovation you think constitutes an invention, Microsoft might just be the father of tabbed browsing after all..?
I've got 8 browsers on my desktop, (Making webpages I like to test them in as many as possilble), I find firefox the most reliable; but the likes of the 'Acoo' browser and 'Avant' are good too.
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