The tiniest shift, history shows us, can signal the greatest change. Recent news that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser had lost a single percentage point of market share might not sound all that significant today, but it could well mean the browser wars are back on. One percent is all it takes.
The signs have been growing since the beginning of June. Since then, Microsoft has reformed the IE product team, Apple has unveiled details of its new browser, Safari 2, and the Mozilla project has released major new versions of Firefox and Camino, along with details of new funding from Nokia.
Opera has entered beta testing for its new Mac browser and a major new industry body burst into existence to form proposals for open standards for Web applications. In short, we’re rocking like it’s 1997.
So, let’s step back, and catch up with some history. By 1997, you might remember, the Internet had finally caught on. At the time, the most popular Web browser was Netscape Navigator. It had 72% of the market, compared to IE 3’s 18%.
But then, in October of that year, came IE 4. It was much better than Navigator, and — in an action that would later see Microsoft prosecuted for antitrust violations — came with a business plan that sought to destroy the relatively tiny Netscape.
This it did: by the next year, with the launch of Windows 98 and IE coming free and preinstalled, Netscape was in deep trouble. Eventually bought out by AOL, it saw its market share plummet. Today, just more than 94% of all Web users are working with IE.
But now, we find that Microsoft’s share has, for the first time, dropped. Ever so slightly, from 95,73% to 94,73%.
”It’s the first time we’ve seen a sustained trend downward for them,” says Geoff Johnston, an analyst with WebSideStory in the United Kingdom, which produced these results. ”We have a trend. It’s been about a month, and every day we have a steady incremental change.”
So what’s going on?
Firstly, this past year has seen a series of well-publicised security issues with IE coincide with the maturation of the various alternatives to IE. This has resulted in many people moving to systems such as Firefox, prompted invariably by news reports, good reviews or the recommendations of friends.
Secondly, that very maturation has come as the developers of alternative browsers have been concentrating on the support of openly developed standards. Instead of developing things in-house and dropping them on a previously unsuspecting opposition, Microsoft’s rivals are working with each other to implement public standards from bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
One difference today is that, apart from Opera, none of the competitors to IE’s dominant position is in it for the cash: they just want a better browser.
When Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, recently demonstrated the new features of the 2.0 version of Safari to a developers’ conference, he wasn’t demonstrating features closed to Apple. He was showing Apple’s particular implementation of open standards that it is building with the rest of the browser community. Mozilla and the rest will be free to follow suit, not as copycats, but as equals within a standards process.
For its part, the newly reformed Microsoft IE development team is keen to find out where it is going wrong. It has opened a site for users to leave feature requests, and the team holds monthly online chats. These make for interesting reading, if only for the curious way all of the requested features — pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, compliance with the accepted W3C standards, for example — are all things that have been around for nearly two years in rival browsers.
With only one major upgrade since 1999, IE is far behind the curve on Web technology.
For the users of more modern browsers, these irritations are things of the past — although the upcoming Windows XP upgrade will fix some major holes and, reportedly, install a pop-up blocker. — Â