Browser Wars

New versions of the two most popular web browsers have burst onto the scene. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is due to appear by the end of the year, while Mozilla Corporation's Firefox 3 (Fx3) was released on June 17. The 'public beta' version of IE8 was made available on August 27 and can be downloaded from the Windows IE8 Home Page. Both browsers claim to offer significant advancements to the web-browsing experience. In addition to these two new browsers, search giant Google have recently launched their own browser, "Chrome", which they hope will eat into IE's share of the market and become a base for more complex Web 2.0 applications. We have used this in the office and like it alot!

Microsoft has historically included IE with their Windows operating system, so it has become the dominant browser in the market. However, Firefox has made significant inroads into IEs market share over the past couple of years. For this reason we target both IE (6/7/8) and Firefox (2/3) when coding our webpages. As of August 2008, IE has 72% of the market while Firefox has approximately 19% (statistics from Net Applications).

If you are a FireFox user we now suggest you upgrade to Fx3. If you use IE then we hope that you are already using IE7, and when it's fully released, will also upgrade to IE8. Chrome is available to download as beta version from the Google hompage.

We will be checking all our client sites in these browsers to ensure they look consistent with previous versions, but do let us know if you spot anything different when using IE8, Fx3 and Chrome!

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