Browser Face-Off

Browsing to Come

The renewed browser wars are still in their early stages, and though IE has been losing market share over the past year, it remains dominant. As of late October 2005 almost 81 percent of Americans used IE, and 14 percent favored Firefox, according to Web analytics company OneStat.com. Only a small percentage of people used Opera, Netscape, and all other browsers combined.

The number of users jumping to Firefox has slowed recently after its Cinderella-like debut, leading some experts to suggest only a finite number of people are willing or able to try an alternate browser. "For many people, Internet Explorer is just not broken," Geoff Johnston, an analyst with research firm WebSideStory, said in a press release.

Those users may have even less reason to switch when IE 7 launches. At that point, IE, Firefox, and Opera will all have similar features and similar, tight interfaces.

To enjoy more-distinctive features, you have to turn to smaller browsers. Flock, a Firefox-based browser, just hit the Net with a pre-beta offering that is still rough but contains a number of nice features in the new realm of social browsing. This growing trend puts heavy emphasis on sharing information via blogs, swapping photos and bookmarks, and interacting with people, as opposed to consuming static Web content and keeping your preferences and opinions to yourself.

Flock ties available services directly into its browser. The Deli.cio.us site already lets users store and share bookmarks; Flock bookmarks synchronize with the site automatically. A blog editor is built in, as is a Flickr toolbar that lets you easily upload pictures to that photo-sharing site. Whether Flock will become anything more than a niche browser remains to be seen, but it's worth tracking.

Consumer Choice

In the end, it's the perfect war: No one loses. If you use IE and don't want to bother with one of the richer options, you'll finally get some of the features that fans of other browsers have crowed about, with added security to boot.

If you want more out of your browser, choosing Firefox or Opera comes down to whether you like to tinker.

Firefox's huge laundry list of add-ons let you poke and play until you have a browser heavily customized to your personal tastes. That's a seductive idea, but in practice it requires a fair amount of time and effort.

Opera is different. It comes with several advanced features that you can get in Firefox only with add-ons, and that IE lacks entirely. However, Opera has no plans to introduce Firefox-like extensions, so if you don't like the way it does something, you're stuck.

Regardless, just having a choice is a great thing for consumers. Vive la différence.