The Battle Of The Browsers – The History And The Future Of Internet Browsers

With Internet Explorer 8 now available, can Microsoft hope to retain market dominance over fierce open source rivals such as Mozilla’s Firefox or the feature packed Opera web browser. Can history give us a clue to what the future of web browsers/browsing might hold? How did Netscape Navigator go from having a dominant 89.36% market share of all web browsers in 1996 and yet only 3.76% by mid 1999?

Let us take a journey that will begin long before even the intellectual conception of Internet Explorer, that will glance at its long defeated rivals, examine the current browsers available and will end with a prediction of what the future of browsing will offer us – and which browser(s) will still be around to offer it.

People often think that Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser since the golden age of the internet began. Well for a very long time now it has indeed been the most popular browser and at times been almost totally unrivalled. This was mainly a result of it being packaged free with Microsoft Windows, in what some would later call a brutal monopolisation attempt by Microsoft. The last few years however have heralded the arrival of new, possibly superior browsers. Mozilla’s Firefox has been particularly successful at chipping away at Explorers market dominance. So where did it all begin, and why were Microsoft ever allowed to have a hundred percent market dominance?

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Technorati Tags: Internet browser, Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft Windows, Mosaic, Mozilla's Firefox, Netscape Navigator, Opera, Safari, Web

Improving the web. Blogging, Google and Web standards.

The web has really changed the way we do things. Remember those paper timetables? No need for them anymore, we simply type in our destination on a box and get a step by step guide for what to do. Finding recipies? No need to look through books any more, just type in a few ingredients on your favourite food site. The examples are countless but there is no time for us to sit back and relax just yet. The web can be improved. We can get more people to publish their stuff online, we can get better tools for finding relevant info, and we can make the information accessible to more people. In this article I’m going to talk a little about each of those three points.

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Technorati Tags: blogging, browser, Google, Web, web development, web standards

Internet Explorer 8

New Features To Slice, Store, And Accelerate Your Web Applications

Daron Yöndem

This article is based on a prerelease version of Internet Explorer 8. All information is subject to change.

In this article, I will look into the details of these features to see how Internet Explorer 8 can make life easier for both developers and users alike. You’ll see how these new features allow you to define portions of a page and control its update frequency and expiration, improve the user’s search and navigation experience, and lots more.

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Technorati Tags: browser, Internet Explorer 8, Web, web slices