“The battle to build the best Web browser is now a five-way fight,” Brian Caulfield reports for Forbes. “Just when you thought the browser wars couldn’t get any weirder, here comes Steve Jobs rumbling onto the scene like the Stay Puft Marshmallow man tromping over buildings in downtown Manhattan.”
Caulfield reports, “If last year’s release of Safari for Windows seemed like an experiment, Apple’s release Tuesday of a beta version of Safari 4 for Mac and Windows makes it clear this is going to be the messiest fight since Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray battled Zuul and Gozer the Gozerian in the movie Ghost Busters. Currently, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer owns 67.6% of the browser market, followed by Mozilla’s Firefox with 21.5%, Apple’s Safari with 8.3%, Google’s Chrome with 1.1% and Opera with 0.7%, according to NetApplications.”
MacDailyNews Take: No offense to Opera, it’s a fine browser that has introduced quite a few important features and concepts, but it has never even cracked 1% (Opera’s record is 0.75%, set in Oct. 2008, it’s lost 0.05% since then) and therefore should not be included with the others. The rule is, “If you crack 1%, you get included; if you never can, you get ignored,” okay? For all intents and purposes, the browser wars are currently a 4-way fight.
Caulfield reports, “It would be fair to say we’re now living in the golden age of the Web browser.”
Full article here.
