Skip forward to today and we're facing a different scene. 'Now it's a game of one-upping each other.' 'Were there not other competitors who were just as interested in making Web browsers faster, I don't know if we'd be able to find the gains that we can find,' he said. Can you think of anything else in the world that can get 20 percent better in only a few months? When I asked Beltzner how coders managed that feat, he pointed to his rivals. Keep in mind that the previous version was released just last June. Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox at Mozilla, told me recently that his browser's 'javascript engine'-which runs complex, interactive Web applications like Gmail or Google Maps-is 20 percent faster in the new Firefox 3.6 than in the previous version. A 2010 article from Slate sums up the fantastic effects of the frenzy:īrowsers keep getting faster. While Internet Explorer continued to hemorrhage users, the speedy upstart Chrome gave Firefox competition that was much more serious than anything it had faced before. But the true browser golden age was ushered in by Google Chrome.

When IE7 came out in 2006 it was much improved, no doubt spurred on in part by the looming threat of Firefox. It was rife with security issues, offered poor support for the day's web standards, and lacked now-basic features like tabbed browsing that were present in the competing Firefox. IE 6 (supported from 2001 to 2008) was, and is, widely reviled as one of the worst pieces of tech garbage ever. In the five years prior, Firefox had climbed up from two percent of the market to nearly twenty, siphoning users from IE, which bled out from 95 percent to 75 percent in the same time.Īnd the version of Internet Explorer that Firefox was stealing users from was a real dog. Internet Explorer, bloated by years of monopoly, was under vicious guerrilla attack by Mozilla Firefox. When Google Chrome was released in late 2008, the web browser world was already in flux. But before we dig too much further into that, let's take a look at how we got to where we are.

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