Browser Wars

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the battles that pitted Internet Explorer against Netscape Navigator. It seemed for awhile that Microsoft had slain all other browsers with Firefox remaining an outlier for years. However, Firefox has continued to grow in popularity and with the recent rise of Google Chrome the browser landscape is rapidly evolving. Google Chrome is built on Chromium, an open source browser project, which is sparking browsers of it’s own.

Case in point, have you heard of RockMelt? It’s another salvo in the browser war and it gives a taste of things to come. RockMelt’s focus is purely social. It’s a nexus of sharing, allowing users the ability to browse the web, share updates, and interact with friends through Twitter and Facebook.

With more data residing in the Cloud the question moves to “how do we access this data?” Currently almost all browsers have some sort of customization; Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Internet Explorer all have Extensions while Firefox has Add-On’s. Browser extensions and add-on’s are evolving to become full fledged apps within a browser. The latest Chromium update from Google highlights this switch. Although some are proclaiming that the browser is dead I think we’re simply witnessing a new evolution.

We all know from experience that Desktop Applications still out power their Cloud cousins. What’s changing can be best witnessed by viewing the accounting software market. For example, instead of a full service Client Ledger System like Intuit’s Quickbooks we’re seeing small “do one thing well” applications.

By compartmentalizing the ability of apps we’re left with two things:

1. Simple high speed low drag apps

2. The App Economy.

We’ll cover these more later this week.