NEWS
The browser wars are heating up, as Internet Explorer's rivals gain market share.
After resetting its methodology to better account for global variations, Net Applications' browser usage statistics show Mozilla's Firefox had the most notable gain, from 22.5 per cent to 23 per cent, while Google's Chrome rose from 2.6 per cent to 2.8 per cent.
Apple's Safari was flat at 4.1 per cent, and IE dipped from 67.7 per cent to 67 per cent. Opera, in fifth place just before this week's release of Opera 10, was essentially flat at two per cent.
The browser wars are back in full swing. Though IE remains dominant, rivals are racing to build in new features to make the web a better foundation for applications - the vision Netscape had back in the first generation of browser wars of the 1990s. Only recently has Microsoft joined the HTML 5 discussion in earnest.
This time profitable powerhouses such as Google are pushing this web applications facet of cloud computing, and even Microsoft is embracing the trend with an online version of Office. Using the browser and the web to run applications has a lot more meat on its bones after a decade of work.
Microsoft is working to wean the world from IE 6, the version of the browser that shipped with Windows XP, and has made some progress, according to Net Applications' statistics.
IE 8 usage increased from 12.5 per cent to 15.1 per cent usage from July to August, while IE 6 dropped from 27.2 per cent to 25.3 per cent. IE 7 decreased from 23.1 per cent to 21.1 per cent.
Mozilla's newer version 3.5 of Firefox, released in June, also made gains from 4.5 per cent to 8.9 per cent. Firefox 3.0 dropped from 16.2 per cent to 12.5 per cent.
Using a modern browser is important when it comes to bringing the web application technology to fruition. Older browsers lack support for advancements in page layout and graphics, HTML features such as built-in video, and perhaps most crucially, fast execution of web-based JavaScript programs.
