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With Firefox 3 release, 'browser wars are back'


By Robert Mullins
July 1, 2008 — 
Browser Wars I ended when Microsoft crushed Netscape in the late 1990s. Browser Wars II began June 17, in one analyst’s view, when the Mozilla Foundation launched Firefox 3.

In the first 24 hours it was available, Firefox 3 was downloaded 8.3 million times, at a rate that peaked around 17,000 downloads per minute, Mozilla CEO John Lilly reported on his blog; the rush was five times that for Firefox 2, which had 1.6 million downloads on its first day.

The open-source Firefox 3 boasts more features, better security, faster performance and less memory consumption, among other benefits. But while Mozilla people celebrated with a cookout at their headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., a few hundred miles north in Redmond, Microsoft continued to work on Internet Explorer 8. A second beta release of IE 8 is set for August, with a final release expected later this year.

“The browser wars are back,” said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research.

“It’s great that we have this kind of competition among all three of the major browsers,” Hammond said, referring to Explorer, Firefox and WebKit, the open-source browser engine on which Apple’s Safari and several mobile browsers are built.

Internet Explorer remains the browser market leader, but its share has declined as Firefox’s has risen. According to a Forrester Research survey of the enterprise Web browser market, IE’s share fell to 78.7% in December 2007, from 88.7% in January 2007; Firefox’s grew to 18% from 9.8% during the same period.

Mozilla Corp., the for-profit unit of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, said that Firefox 3 is nine times faster than IE 7, two to four times faster than Firefox 2 and needs roughly one-fifth as much memory to operate than IE 7.

The Firefox development team has been a stickler for improving memory management, said Damon Sicore, director of platform engineering for Mozilla.

Sicore added, “We had a very focused session on performance:  over four and a half months just to focus on JavaScript performance, getting memory utilization down and reducing code size while still increasing performance.”

However, one notable addition to Firefox increases memory consumption, at least temporarily. The offline support feature makes it possible to use a browser-based application even when the computer isn’t connected to the Internet. Work done on the application is stored in memory until the next online session, then data is synched with the Web server.

“Let’s say I’m on a plane and I want to interact with Google Mail,” Sicore said. “[The user] can say, ‘I want to take this particular application offline,’ and you can read e-mails, compose e-mails and interact with the application as if you were connected.”

Developers of rich Internet applications have been looking at Adobe AIR and Google Gears to gain offline access to Web applications, said Hammond. “But the idea that it can be solved in the browser without much thought is pretty cool.”


Related Search Term(s): Open-source development, Microsoft, Mozilla


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