Almost thirty years' war

This is a battle that has been going on since the advent of the World Wide Web. There were already winners, whose victory later turned out to be far from final. And although in the end it seemed that Google "rolled", combat antimony is heard again.

New (though not exactly the same) Edge Browser by Microsoft (1) was recently available for both Windows and MacOS, but not in beta. It is based on the Chromium codebase, mainly maintained by Google.

Microsoft's moves could have far-reaching implications, and they're not the only changes we've seen in the web browser market lately. After some stagnation in this area, something has shifted, and some are even talking about the return of the browser war.

Almost simultaneously with the entry of Edge "seriously" there was information about layoffs in Mozilli.

- the acting president of the company told the TechCrunch service, Mitchell Baker. This has been interpreted in various ways, although some see it as a sign of convergence rather than a collapse of Mozilla.

Could Microsoft and Mozilla understand something?

Microsoft seems to have realized that the project of creating an entirely own web display program was an uphill that was not worth the investment and resources.

Too many websites look bad in Edge just because they're written specifically for Chrome or Webkit Safari, without following more universal standards.

The irony is that a long time ago, Microsoft Internet Explorer almost completely took over the Web because it required native code from web developers. Now Microsoft has made the difficult decision to abandon its own product of this kind and switch to the same technology as Chrome. But there are also differences. For example, Microsoft takes a different stance than Google on website tracking and has, of course, integrated Edge into its services.

When it comes to Mozilla, we're primarily talking about a shift in focus towards a more privacy-focused operating model. Firefox's decision to block tracking cookies inspired Apple to be even more aggressive in this regard last year and introduce the tracking blocking policy in WebKit.

At the beginning of 2020, even Google was forced to take some action about this and made a commitment to permanently disable third-party cookies.

Privacy: The New Battleground in the Browser Wars

The new version of the old war will be the most brutal on the mobile web. The mobile Internet is a real swamp, and with seamless tracking and data sharing, surfing the web on mobile devices feels downright toxic.

However, since the publishers of these pages and the advertising companies cannot work together to remedy the situation, browser developers seem to be responsible for developing mechanisms to limit surveillance. However, each browser company takes a different approach. Not everyone believes that everyone is acting in the interests of Internet users, and not, for example, for the sake of profit from advertising.

When we talk about the new browser war, two facts are important. First, there are radical methods and solutions. changing role of advertising, significantly or completely limit their impact on the network. Secondly, our view of such a war as a fight for market share is largely outdated. On the mobile web - and this, as we have already mentioned, is the main field of new competition - switching to other browsers occurs to a small extent, and sometimes it is not possible, as is the case with the iPhone, for example. On Android, most of the options are based on Chromium anyway, so this choice becomes somewhat bogus.

The new browser wars are not about who will create the fastest or best browser in any other sense, but about what services the recipient expects and what data policy they trust.

Don't be a monopoly, don't be

By the way, it is worth recalling a bit the history of the browser wars, because it is almost as old as the WWW.

The first browsers convenient for ordinary Internet users began to appear around 1993. Soon the program took a leading position. Mosaic (2) perfect in shape Netscape Navigator. In 1995 appeared Internet Explorer Microsoft, which initially did not matter, but which had a great future.

2. Tiled Browser Window

Internet Explorer (IE) was destined for this because it was included in the Windows software package as the default browser. Although Microsoft was sued for antitrust in this case, it still held 2002% of the browser market in 96. Total dominance.

In 2004, the first version of Firefox appeared, which quickly began to take the market from the leader (3). In many ways, this was Netscape's "revenge", since fire fox was developed from the source code of an old browser trusted by the Mozilla Foundation, which unites the developer community. Back in 2009, Firefox was in the lead in the world ranking, although there was no clear dominant then, and different statistics testified to fierce competition. In 2010, IE's market share fell below 50% for the first time.

3. Browser wars before 2009

These were different times than the early Internet era, and a new player, the browser, was growing rapidly. Google Chromelaunched in 2008. For some time, rankings like StatCounter have shown three browsers with more or less equal rankings. Sometimes Explorer has come back to the lead, sometimes Chrome has outpaced it, and occasionally Firefox has taken the lead. The mobile web played an increasingly important role in the market share data of competing software, and it was clearly dominated by Google and its Android system with Chrome.

It's been going on for years second browser war. Finally, after an uphill battle, Chrome was forever ahead of its competitors in 2015. In the same year, Microsoft stopped development of new versions of Internet Explorer by introducing the new Edge browser in Windows 10.

By 2017, the shares of Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer had fallen well below 5% for each, while Google Chrome reached over 60% of the global market. In May 2017, Andreas Gal, one of the former Mozilla bosses, publicly announced that Google Chrome had won the Second Browser War (4). By the end of 2019, Chrome's market share had risen to 70%.

4. Changes in browser market share over the past decade

However, this is still less than IE in 2002. It's worth adding that after achieving this dominance, Microsoft only slid down the ladder in browser battles - until it had to resign itself and reach for its great competitor's programming tools. We also need to remember that the Mozilla Foundation is an organization, and its struggles are driven by slightly different motives than in the case of the pursuit of Google's profits.

And as we mentioned - when a new browser war is fought over user privacy and trust, Google, which has deteriorating ratings in this area, is not doomed to success. But of course she will fight. 

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