Will there be a third browser war?
In the early 90s when the interned was new to the general public (the military had been using it for a long time before), the release of multiple browsers Cello, Arena, Lynx, tkWWW, and Mosaic started the brief Mosaic war. When Netscape Navigator came to the market in 1994 it dominated them all and had the most usage share. In 1995 the Microsoft Windows revolution took place and Internet Explorer (IE) was released alongside Windows 95. IE rapidly gained usage share, and the competition between Netscape Navigator and IE intensified leading to the First Browser Wars (1995-2001). By 2001 IE gained 90 % usage share across all sorts of computers while Netscape crashed and IE was the undisputed winner of the First Browser Wars.
In 2004 after some times of IE monopoly Mozila Firefox was released and started a rapid expansion kick starting the Second Browser Wars (2004-2017). In 2007 Netscape (which never recovered again) discontinued. The competition between IE and Firefox was smooth, other browsers Safari, Opera, etc weren't gaining much success. By 2010 Firefox barely overtook IE and newer editions of IE were getting slow and unable to adapt to modern internet features.
Four years into the second browser wars Google Chrome was released in 2008. Chrome's entry was a turning point. Using WebKit rendering engine and a faster JavaScript engine it proved extremely fast and efficient and started getting a rapid usage share. Firefox after its success upto 2010 became stale, slow, inefficient and begun to need to update like once a week , and the purpose of the updates was never understood and rather pointless. The browser even became slow to launch and from 2011 begun a steep decline. IE never recovered after 2010. Google Chrome dominated the browser market by 2012 having the higher usage share than any browsers then, and its user share kept increasing. In 2015 Microsoft moved from IE to Edge but the new browser proved inefficient and unpopular. The biggest advantage of Chrome is its ability to adapt to any new internet feature as well as retaining the power for legacy features. Finally by 2017 usage share of IE, Firefox, Opera, Edge and all other browsers reached below 5% and Chrome reached 70 % and became the undisputed winner of the second browser war, this is even acknowledged by former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal, who in May 2017 publicly acknowledged Chrome's victory.
Chrome's 70 % dominance in 2017 at the end of browser war 2 is bigger than IE's 90% dominance in 2001 as by 2017 more parts of the world and a much higher population has access to the interned than 2001. This 2019 map shows Chrome's current dominance:
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-201909-201909-map
Now after Microsoft realized Edge was a failure (even IE which is used for some legacy applications has a higher usage share than Edge), "Due to Google Chrome's success, Microsoft announced that they would be building a new version of Edge powered by Google's rendering engine, Chromium, rather than their own rendering engine, EdgeHTML". The new browser was released in January 2020 and has been said to be promising triggering talks of the start of the third browser wars from 2020:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068387/browser-wars-microsoft-edge-google-chrome-apple-safari-chromium-webkit-goat-rodeo
So what do you think. Will a third browser war begin and will Microsoft's new browser be able to defeat Chrome? Will other new browsers also gain success?
Yes | 2 | |
No | 6 |