Recent reports highlight Internet Explorer’s drop in percentage of internet users. Given the huge war between Mozilla and IE, it sounds like big news, but is it?
These days I don’t think browsers are as important. The innovation in one is rapidly copied to another. The UI differences between Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome are minimal. Each of them does a good job of rendering standards based HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Each vendor has a use for their browser. Microsoft has a component version of IE it can embed in most of Windows. Apple has a component version of Safari that it can use across Mac OS X and iPhone OS. Google’s browser is optimized to run Google’s style of application. Firefox is a great platform for building browsers, while also being a browser.
The important thing today is to own a destination worth browsing to. And that is a much harder challenge.