The Return of the Browser Wars?

A few years ago Internet Explorer was battling it out with Netscape Navigator to see who would win the hearts and browsing time of the millions who use the web. IE won by a landslide, and its usage is now up in the 96%+ range last I heard. Is this about to change? I sure hope so.

It is not that I hate IE. I don’t. It’s just that a) I like their new rival Firefox quite a bit better and b) basic western economics tell us that a new browser war would be helpful. On the latter, what IE has generally lacked is a competitor, and so Microsoft has done little to improve the product since version 6’s release date in 2002. But that is no huge surprise. But now the buzz is that they have a new competitor, Firefox. FF has been gaining an audience recently and this seems to be bothering some MS folks. I recently heard a report that MS was coming out with IE7, and then heard that they were going to try to release it before Longhorn, the next version of Windows. Could this be a response to FF?

If you haven’t, you should try it out at the Mozilla Firefox page. I switched a few months ago because of the tabbed browsing and all the nice plugins. You might like it too.