22 Upcoming browser roundup

Yahoo! News features an article by PC World, which briefly and to-the-point covers the most important recent or near future developments in the major browsers of today and the contestants of tomorrow: Opera 9, Firefox 1.5, and Internet Explorer 7.

I remind you that these are all beta-state versions, which are due by the end of this year or early next year. As such, they will all bring shiny new features to the table, in an attempt to come above.

Firefox has greatly improved it’s automated update mechanism (and yes, it works), allowing users to upgrade both their browser and their extensions efortlessly and without the need to grab the entire installation kit all over again. It has also managed to implement a better cache, which (finally) allows Back and Forward to take effect almost instantly.

Following its recent release as a completely free (ie. no money) browser, Opera has seen a surge of millions in user numbers. In v9, it plans to bring people support for Atom 1.0 and a little something dubbed “widgets”, which will allow people to write small desktop applications which use the Opera engine for things like weather display or feed browsing.

Neither of them, however, has so far managed to make a really big dent in Explorer’s size of the market, although analists suggest that the average 10% taken over by Firefox is quite a feat to accomplish. As the victor in Browser War I, Explorer has enjoyed suppremacy for an important number of years, and even today, in spite of being horribly outdated, feature-wise, the practice of making it the default browser in newly installed Microsoft Windows systems still manages to keep it firmly on top. Nevertheless, IE7 will finally get some new features (such as tabbed browsing, albeit sub-par compared to the nifty range of features found in the other two) or a tighter security model, since Explorer has a sad fame for being somewhat of a Swiss cheese in this respect, if you know what I mean…

The article is nicely put together and manages to review all the important aspects of the new versions. What’s more important, there seems to be a significant lack of bull, which is truly remarkable.

Why is this important? In case you’re just finding out about this, we are currently in the midst of Browser War II. The first part of the war started with Explorer as the undisputed rules, standing over the fallen body of what was once Netscape Navigator, dead in its prime, at only version 4. Mozilla was just an alpha-state child at the time, but over the years it managed to grow into a very interesting Internet suite (browser, email, composer, chat). Later, it decided to split its components into separate bits, which led to the creation of Firefox. True to its original name (Phoenix), this browser has raised from the ashes of its predecessor and is now at the neck of the ruler.

Meanwhile, Opera has always had a small, but very solid bunch of followers. It boasts the fastest JavaScript engine and the largest CSS standard compliance, and apparently there’s just something about it that makes people ignore Firefox’s extension paradise.

We have arrived, hence, at a crux in the state of the war. Microsoft has postponed this for as much as it could, but it is now time to do something about it. IE7’s biggest challenge will be security, IMHO, because users have already proven that they can live without the added features. If they manage to make v7 secure software, they will keep their suppremacy. If not, and v7 proves to be a dissapointment in this respect, they’ll face hard times, because it’s already becoming clear that they won’t be able to match Firefox or Opera in terms of features any time soon.