The change in web browsers

Last night I noticed an interesting article on The Next Web about Google launching their own web browser "Chrome". This morning I opened up Google Reader to find a wide array of posts on the same subject. It all started with Blogoscoped who posted an article about a Google comic book they were sent about Chrome.

Google Chrome seems to offer a few new features, and a lot from other browsers, all based on the Webkit framework (as used by Apple's Safari). According to Blogoscoped here are the features of Chrome:
- Open source
- Javascript virtual machine (V8)
- Special tabs (above address bar)
- Auto complete address bar
- "Speed dial" home page
- Privacy mode
- Web apps launched in own browser
- Malware and phishing updates

So it sounds like it should be a good browser, we will all just have wait and see.

There seems to be more and more browsers popping up all the time. At first it was just Netscape, then Microsoft worked out what the Internet was and started bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with Windows. This meant that most Windows users (around 90%-95% of the world) used the bundled IE. Apple started bundling Safari with their Mac OS X operating system so many Mac users used that. Firefox is currently the second most used browser after IE but has to be downloaded and installed which many users won't know how to do or won't see any reason to do.

There are then loads of other browser available offering slightly different things, the biggest and oldest "other browser" is Opera, but then there are ones like Konqueror which is bundled with some flavours of Linux. Then there is Flock which classes itself as the "Social web browser" which I have tried so many times but have never got into it.

The image above is the browser stats for this site for August 2008. One thing it shows it that I had 988 visitors, the other thing is that Firefox is on top. I have already stated in this post that Firefox is the second most popular web browser, but I guess because I talk about more geeking things I get geeky visitors, and Firefox seems to be the Geek's choice.

So I have titled this post "The change in web browsers" so should just mention the future change. When Google Chrome comes out it will be interesting to see what happens, but it currently seems like Firefox is getting more and more popular. I cannot see Firefox or any other browser beating IE unless Microsoft are forsed to stop bundling it with Windows. Safari and Firefox have the potential of doing very will but chrome may also. If chrome intergrates with Google Mail (Gmail) and Google Apps it could work very well.

I guess we will just have to see what happens.