The Browser Wars

Jacksonville - The times in which Microsoft Internet Explorer was the most commonly used web browser and dominated the web, are long gone. On Thursday, the 19th of March 2009, the 8th version of the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser was released, but its start performance and the adaptation to it by the internet users were not as strong as Microsoft expected.

At 1 p.m. Friday, the 20th of March 2009, only 1.56% of the internet community were using the newest release of Microsoft’s web browser, merely 0.17% more than at its release date, at which 1.39% of web sites were visited with the Internet Explorer 8.

Amongst other things, the result was called “underwhelming” by Aodhan Cullen, who is the founder and CEO of StatCounter, a company that offers web site traffic monitoring services and collected the data about the launch of the Internet Explorer, which is based on more than 4 billion web site page views per month.

Compared to the debut of the web browser Mozilla Firefox 3, Internet Explorer’s biggest competitor, the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 seems to be far off. Firefox 3 was already used in its beta testing phase by 7.8% of the internet users, a number which more than doubled within 3 days after its official release to 18.9%.

First reactions to the Internet Explorer 8 were modest. Obviously the browser still has some teething problems, including the cause of system crashes, the wrong or incomplete display of web sites and incompatibilities with web standards, such as XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.0 and CSS 2.0.

With the help of the new Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft hopes to win back the users they lost in the past to other, increasingly expanding web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Apple Safari.