November 2004 to may 2008, the second war is being prepared

Since the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, and when Firefox got more than 10% of marketshare, the second browser war was announced. The simple term "Browser war" benefited the users in different ways.

• Opera became totally free: being freeware was the only alternative for a web browser to stay in the race. Prior to version 8.5, unregistered versions showed ads banners. The developers needed to find financial resources elsewhere. The next step can be that it will be also opensource.
• Safari was made available to Windows users. Almost every browser is now available on every platform.
• Internet Explorer was constrained to follow standards, with the release of the version 7 and the forthcoming version 8, and a number of security holes were fixed.
• Mozilla Firefox was constrained to constantly enhance its performance, especially in term of speed and memory usage.

But it seems like this war has reached its summum on the month of june 2008. If it hasn't yet really started, then june 2008 is its beginning, and if it has already begun, june 2008 is its hotest period, at least so far.

June 10th, Safari 4 seeded to developers

Safari 3.1.1 was announced to be the fastest web browser on any platform, as it loads pages up to 1.9 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari 4 increases again Javascript performance by 53%. Since Firefox is also about to release the version 3, more performant in term of speed, seeding Safari 4 to developers seems to be Apple's answer to maintain an aspect of the browser war: tha browser speed race. Arul N S says Safari 4's Javascript engine, Squirrelfish will be faster than SpiderMonkey, the Firefox 3's engine.

June 12th, Opera 9.5 released

Less than a week after that, and less than a week before Firefox 3 final is scheduled to be released, Opera releases the version 9.5, emphasizing on keywords web standards and speed and performance, again.

June 17th, the Download Day for Firefox 3 Final

Mozilla found the most exciting idea for the release of its Firefox 3. It's the Download Day 2008: the goal is to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours. At the time of writing this post, 75 minutes before the hour H, (1.702.903) 1.721.775 pledged to download it during that day.

The final version of Internet Explorer 8 is expected at the end of the year

Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 will be released soon, probably between July 1st and September 30th. It could also be released during this month of june, who knows.

And the winner is ...

According to the w3schools statistics, the winner of the browser war is still ... Internet Explorer who had 54.8% of the marketshare in April 2008. Mozilla and Firefox get about 40%, Safari has only 2.2% and Opera 1.4%.

According to my stats, ie the visitors of my site, the result is a bit different: Mozilla and Firefox has 51.73%, Internet Explorer is at second position with 44.20%, Safari has 3% and Opera 1%.

One thing is sure, however: Mozilla's market share is constantly increasing, gaining more than the other browsers, and Internet Explorer is, on the other hand, constantly decreasing day after day.

To predict the future, I see Internet Explorer going under 30% in the next 12 months, Mozilla Firefox will grow up to 60%, Safari will get 10% or less, Opera will stay at 1%, unless it choose to go opensource.