Browser Wars – Episode 3

We meander around the web, fall down YouTube holes, read gardening blogs, and laugh at funny cat videos; all while not even knowing that a quiet war is being fought over which browser you do it on.

Last week we introduced you to the silent yet brilliant development of the Opera browser, and the subterfuge of Google, now we bring our little abridged history into the modern era in part three of Browser Wars.

Mozilla was dominating, and Google was taking notes.

Microsoft – no matter how hard they tried – just didn’t seem to have the time to develop a stable web browser. They had too many plates spinning over the computer world and seemed to be having trouble keeping them all going at the same time.

Then in 2007, the rumors were started sprouting up that “Google is making its own browser.” Having won the hearts of the internet public by becoming the most reliable search engine, Google used some of the cunning and guile it seemed to have learned from Microsoft to spark a fire for its new “designs” in the world of browsers.

​In September 2008 Chrome spurred Google’s climb toward the top of the internet food chain. A browser that let us search the web at the speed of mouse clicking. Google began releasing new updates almost every month. Chrome helped us organize our lives, view our planet from the comfort of our homes and didn’t crash when we taxed it with our thirst for knowledge. Google’s Chrome seemed to have no boundaries.

While this was going on, world seemed to have forgotten about oh-so-forgettable Internet Explorer, and it was Mozilla’s turn to scramble to keep up. Firefox began releasing updates one after another in an attempt to rise back to the top. Unfortunately, this caused Firefox to become unstable at times, it’s coding demonstrating the panic of the company.

​Technological advances were out growing the software we were using to explore the knowledge that was now quite literally now at our fingertips. With Windows 10 we learned what Microsoft had been doing in order to get a better foothold in the World Wide Web. Edge was shown to us for the first time, and had some innovations of its own.

Sadly, it seemed that Microsoft was still trying to keep too many balls in the air. Edge was and is exciting in some of the things that it can do, but it still feels a bit wobbly from such a rushed development.

The browser war continues, and each time we open our browser of choice we inadvertently help in the fight – and each time one of the players creates a new innovation, the battle begins anew.

​For now, we know who the major players are, but as we’ve seen, that can always change rather quickly.