Well, as we’ve been expecitng now for the past couple of years, the latest battle in the ongoing Browser Wars is upon us.
In the Blue corner, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0. Now with a improved rendering engine, tabbed browsing, feed support and all the goodies that the opponent has had for years.
In the Red corner, Firefox 2.0. The open-source contender; risen from the ashes of Netscape. Featuring a new interface, improved feed support and built in spell checking.
And I’m actually impressed by both of them.
IE has taken a dramatic leap forward. Finally the built-in Windows browser has escaped the ’90′s and has a rendering engine capible of more than basic CSS. It behaves more consistently with more standards-compliant browsers and for web-designers it is going to make our jobs easier (once the concentration of IE6 users falls significantly at least).
Firefox, on the web-design side of things hasn’t changed much, but as far as the end-user is concerned it is more polished and should help with further increasing its installed user-base – especially further into mainstream usage.
This battle has been more quiet than previous battles and may actually help to push this section of the industry forward in a positive way.
Related Links:
3 Comments
It looks like IE and Firefox will now basically be exactly the same browser… except one will be owned by Microsoft.
I just downloaded Firefox 2. The built in spell checker is a great tool, especially since I post on a lot of forums!
I d/l ie 7 as well. It’s similar but after using Firefox for so long it’s a bit hard to get used to. Seems a bit too fussy for me.