In the everlasting battle for the browser supremacy, Internet Explorer is still losing ground to its main rival: Mozilla’s Firefox. The latest figures released by Net Applications, a company that tracks the browser usage, have shown that in December 2008, Internet Explorer was used by only 68.15% of Internet users, while Firefox has managed to maintain its market share over 20 percent, being used by 21.34% of users.The first time when Firefox managed to surpass to 20 percent milestone was in November 2008 with 20.78%.

 

During 2008, Mozilla released the third version of its browser and since its official release Firefox has increased its market share month after month.

Firefox 3 offers a far better Internet browsing experience than its predecessors, being a lot faster than Firefox 2, as the company took care of several bugs and memory leaks. Also, the company’s developers added many new features meant to better the streamline usage in addition to the introduction of some new tools for easily identifying favorite Web sites and remembering them.

 

Also in October 2008, Mozilla released the first beta version of its new Firefox browser, the 3.1. The new browser provides several new features such as location awareness, significantly improved JavaScript performance, 3D preview during tab switching and better compliance with web standards. The thing that stands out the most is its speed, clearly one of the company’s main focuses in the development process.

 

Also, the data collected by Net Applications, have showed that Google’s Chrome browser is another competitor which increased its market share.

In December 2008, Google Chrome has grabbed 1.04% of browser market, surpassing for the first time the 1 percent milestone.

Google Chrome’s achievement is quite impressive, especially because the browser is a new comer in the browser battle. Chrome was launched as beta version in September and on December 13 it has had been released out of beta, with the 1.0 version having been made available for download for the Windows operating system. The support for Linux and Mac OS X is still in the works.

 

But why Google needs a browsers of its own? The company line is that today's Web browsers - Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox chief among them - were built at a time when most of what people did on the Web was viewing static Web pages. Now, Google says, folks want to do all sorts of things on the Web: play games, balance their checkbooks, upload and watch elaborate multimedia presentations, even compose documents or create spreadsheets. The major Web browsers, Google's management and developers say, have been slow to keep pace with what users are demanding of the Internet.

 

Google's answer to this was to create a brand new Web browser built from the ground up using the latest technologies and technological innovations. And the goal was to build this new browser as an open source model, meaning that developers from around the world will have access to the inner workings of the code so that add-ons, extensions, and improvements can be made by the world-wide community of developers. Google believes that with this platform, developers will be able to build the next generation of Web applications.

 

Apple has also reasons to be thrilled by the December results. Its Safari browser has increased its market share, slowly by steady through 2008. Safari has started 2008 with 5.70 percent (February) and it has ended with 7.93 percent (December).

 

However, 2009 could bring a new turn in the browser war, because as Net Applications noted the December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage. This increased the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and other products that have relatively high residential usage.