Return of the Browser Wars?

No it’s not another George Lucas film, but it looks like a new round in the browser wars…

First up, Google Chrome is going to be announced soon (9/3?) and if you’ve ever heard me have my conversation on how browsers are just too bloated and flaky and need to use multiple processes for stability, then you’ll see that Google has answered my rant. If it lives up to half of what’s described in that “comic”, Chrome will be my new browser of choice. For all intensive purposes, Chrome == Google OS.

And then there’s IE 8 which builds a Firebug like set of tools right into the browser called Developer Tools. Now if only they would release it and get all of our client’s to upgrade in a timely fashion…

And finally, there’s Mozilla adding JIT technology to browser’s Javascript engines with TraceMonkeyto improve performance by orders of magnitude. (P.S. Google’s also building this idea into Chrome).

And I don’t mean to leave Safari out since it’s grown to over a 6% market share, but I don’t have any news on that front other than that both Safari and Google Chrome are both based on the WebKitbrowser rendering engine.

It’ll be interesting to see how this impacts browser trends. And as it relates to our work, how it will impact which browser(s) we’ll need to target for web apps. In particular, the Google browser could have a big impact when you consider that Google has almost 80% of the search engine market share. Of course, all of this chaos could also drive some clients towards plugin based approaches like Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc.

The good news is that all of these developments are at least arguably steps forward as opposed to the browsers wars of the past that inflicted IE<7 upon us.