Sep
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Was Firefox Chrome’s Red Herring?
September 2, 2008 |
Browser wars have never been so dramatic in a long time. Every big player seems to have an ace up it’s sleeve, and nothing’s surprising anymore.
Four years back, the media was talking about ‘a new browser from the makers of Mozilla, called Firefox’. Back then, the Mozilla Foundation funded by Time Warner, IBM and Sun Microsystems launched Firefox version 0.9 on June 15, 2004. And, Firefox 1.0 was out by early November the same year. By 2006, Google had become the largest revenue source for folks at Mozilla with their paid referral agreement.
And, all that Microsoft could pull of in these years was Internet Explorer 7, which had a few features such as a Google-circumventing search bar, and a tool that auto-linked addresses to Microsoft’s Live Maps. This cut no ice for the folks at Redmond. It was soon touted to be one of the worst browsers with poor standards compliance, and a serious memory hog.
By, 2008, Mozilla managed to take up close to 19% of the market share. In it’s fourth year, the company set a record with Firefox 3.0 being downloaded 8 million times since it’s release in June the same year. To top it all, by August, Mozilla announced the renewal of their contract with Google till 2011, ensuring revenue streams for quite some time to come. This was all that we got to hear about Google’s Browser strategy. Back Mozilla!
Redmond rolled out Internet Explorer 8. Soon enough, experts pronounced that IE8 had a long way to go if it was to catch up with Firefox 3.0 in terms of JavaScript performance and web standard compliance.
By now, Apple was pushing Safari, Mozilla was pushing Firefox, Microsoft was pushing IE8, and there was Opera lagging behind with it’s slice of the pie. And, this was all that people were talking about. Microsoft seemed worried about Mozilla! And, everyone seemed to be betting on it to take on Microsoft.
And, all of a sudden, on a sunny September morning, we all wake up to see that folks at Googleplex had a plan! Chrome! Overnight, we have a new wild-card entrant. A Google browser which integrates it’s search engine into a browser like never before! And, the initial responses are amazing.
Chrome in brief:
- a. Is quick to launch
- b. has an intuitive User Experience (tabs are above the address bar)
- c. Integrates ‘’search” and ”address bar” allowing one to type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and web pages.
- d. Is going to be open source, would include a new JavaScript virtual machine, and Google Gears add-on by default
Well, they’ve packed quite a punch for a start. Wonder which way the browser wars would go now? Is Google planning on dislodging Firefox with Chrome, or is it looking to take on Microsoft? Is Google’s relationship with Firefox a purely commercial one or a strategic alliance? Was it’s support to Firefox a Red Herring all this while, as Google prepared to enter the space with it’s new weapon! Or will Chrome and Firefox complement each other, co-exist and together take on Microsoft’s IE? Well, we’ll see! One thing’s for sure, all this competition can only do good for the end-user, and that’s what matters 
