Posts Tagged ‘Safari’

The Internet is at war. In fact, the whole consumer market is actively engaging in many wars across many different levels. The thing is, while we know that there is a “browser war” going on out there, we find ourself wondering what exactly is going on. Who is actually fighting and how? We are all familiar with the “big 3” and I would even risk saying “big 5”: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome Browser, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Opera’s Opera Browser. But what are they fighting for? Market share? Mozilla will tell you that they are fighting for the open web, and yet, no one else is. At the end of the day, regardless of the individual motives of the companies, this whole war is about who has the browser you should use.

Apple confidently ignores a trend toward accelerated browser release cycles and maintains the tradition to release updates for Safari when it has time and when it believes that users need them.

The Webkit browsers Chrome and Safari have almost caught up with Firefox in market share. Especially Chrome continues to gain at an astonishing pace: It has become the most popular web browser in some countries, is passing Firefox in major nations and is driving Webkit to daily market shares of more than 30% according to StatCounter. If Chrome can maintain the current trend, it will pass Firefox in market share within five months.

If you had to take a guess about the most often used mobile web browsers, which ones would you pick? In which order?

When you are caught in a 5% market share trap, what are your options? Keep surviving or abandon the business?

Mozilla may have to surrender its position as second most popular browser this month, at least as far as its backend is concerned. The Webkit browsers Chrome and Safari are less than 0.3 points behind today and are breathing down Mozilla’s neck.

There is quite a bit of browser news out there today. Firefox 4 is officially released, Opera discontinues Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.x, and Chrome gets a developer update, as well as multitab support.

There is a perception that Apple software is exponentially more secure than Windows or even Google platforms and applications. In a prestigious hacking contest, Safari was the first browser to be cracked and a Macbook was hacked in less than 5 seconds. Is this the price of popularity or are Apple’s security claims just a smokescreen?

As insignificant Opera may be on the desktop, it is the leading mobile browser globally, with about 105 million active users. However, there are market trends that question the future of the mobile browser.

Internet Explorer ended 2010 with the highest monthly loss of market share in 2 years. Firefox has overtaken IE now in Europe and Google’s Chrome appears to be a freight train that cannot be stopped at this time. IE may still be the king of browsers, but it is more and more apparent that our prediction that IE9 will get Microsoft more in trouble rather than bringing back the glory of IE in the near future is more than credible.

Today’s release of browser market share numbers, as far as they have been made available by Net Applications and StatCounter, and Microsoft’s spin on those numbers got us scratching our heads. Microsoft is trying hard to attach a smile to a browser that is sinking in popularity by selecting data sets that do not matter in the big picture. Or, Microsoft is simply oblivious to the severity and reasons  of IE’s market share decline: Microsoft continues to make the same mistakes with IE8/IE9 that got it into trouble in the first pace with IE6.

The World Web Web’s Technology Standardization Organization, the W3C, has posted HTML 5 compliance test results and concluded that IE9 offers the best HTML 5 browser, as far as standard support is concerned. However, the evaluation may not have been entirely fair, as the W3C used an unannounced version of IE9 at testing time.