Microsoft Challenges Their Competitors
Remember our story about Google’s new web browser and their attempt at web domination? It seems that Microsoft has woken up to smell the sweet aroma of competition. In 2001 Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) which would soon consume the web not for its security or efficiency but because of the mere fact that it was pre-installed with any shipment of the Windows OS. While IE6 was infamous for its frequent crashes, high memory consumption and low efficiency it was irrelevant because most web users were limited to a 56kbs Internet speed. Websites rarely had high quality images, used little JavaScript and most websites were static web pages thus placing minimum load on the browser and the CPU.
In 2009… the web has morphed into a beast that is almost intimidating. Websites are not called websites but web applications. Almost all websites are connected to a database that is used to serve data to web users. The plethora of web scripting and programming languages forces the web architect to arm himself with a huge arsenal of programming books ensuring that his application conforms to all standards. On every site streaming media is available for download. The web is nothing like what we know it to be. These new types of websites and applications were coined ‘Web 2.0‘ applications. Because of this, web browsers had to be re-designed to efficiently display and handle Web 2.0 apps.
Despite the barrage of updates and hotfixes to IE6, it had minimum impact to the efficiency and responsiveness in displaying highly dynamic sites because it simply wasn’t designed for Web 2.0. In 2006 Microsoft’s answer to the increasing frustration and annoyance of IE6 was IE7. Although IE7 solved most problems that existed in IE6 as regards to displaying Web 2.0 sites it wasn’t as efficient as other web browsers. Opera, Firefox and Safari all had a faster and more efficient JavaScript engines and all consumed less memory. Microsoft slowly watched their browser market share fall from 87% in 2006 to 70% in 2009. Exacerbating this fact, Google launched their web browser ‘Chrome’ which boasts one of the fastest JavaScript engine in any browser biting into IE7’s market share.
In an effort to curb this downhill trend Microsoft hastily began development on a new web browser called Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). Microsoft claims that IE8 is the fastest web browser available for today’s social and dynamic websites that heavily uses JavaScript and AJAX. Some of the features that are available on IE8 are Accelerators, Enhanced navigation, increased performance, improved favourites and history management, instant search and Web Slices. Users can download IE8 at : Internet Explorer 8 : Home Page
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I’ve been using Google Chrome a few weeks now and I think it’s great, in fact it has become my preferred web browser. Thanks, I’ll check out Internet Explorer 8 too.