Digital Media

If you're a Mac user with a need for speed, you'll struggle to find a better browser than Mozilla's Camino. Apple's Safari will win a drag race, but it lacks the customizability that comes with an open-source browser like Camino. Unfortunately, both Safari and Camino fall incredibly short against Firefox because both are heavy on speed and light on community.

For those who want a highly optimized, lightning fast browsing experience on the Mac, you can't do much better than Camino, as TechCrunch writes. But most of us want more than that. We want Adblock Plus to filter out ads from our browsing experience. We want Bitly Preview to be able to launch and track tweets from the browser. And more.

Sure, you can "PimpMyCamino," but you won't get nearly the level of detailing that comes with Firefox's impressive community. It's not hard, technically, to migrate from Firefox to Camino, but in the move you're going to end up losing most of the add-ons that make Firefox so powerful.

Camino has ad-blocking functionality built into the browser, and you can find an array of themes to dress it up. But really, the primary reason to use Camino is if you want raw speed. But if that's all you want, Safari is likely a better choice, given the somewhat limited customizations and add-ons available for Camino. Or Google Chrome, which hasn't fully launched on the Mac yet but promises a big speed boost once it does.

Browsing is about more than speed. Firefox delivers a global community with a diverse array of needs and solutions, which is why it remains my preferred browser, even as Camino sprints by, unadorned.

CARLSBAD, Calif.--Although it has managed to grab nearly a quarter of the browser market, Mozilla now finds itself in an unenviable position--competing against Microsoft, Apple, and Google all at the same time.

Speaking at D: All Things Digital on Thursday, Mozilla's Mitchell Baker noted that the company didn't set out with that in mind.

"That's not the business model you are going to pick," Baker said. "It is a daunting space to compete with the three giants of the era."

That said, Baker and fellow Mozilla executive John Lilly said there is still a place for Firefox.

"We've just got to be us," Lilly said. "Mozilla has always been about scratching an itch."

Another challenge, Lilly said, is that people don't perceive the browser as something that changes their Web experience. "Most people just think it's this pane of glass," Lilly said. Three quarters of people use the browser that comes with their computer, he said.

But browsers are important, Lilly maintained.

"We spend more time with our browser than we do in our cars," Lilly said. "The real truth, I spend more time with my browser than I do with my family."

The amount of market share commanded by Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has dropped for the seventh consecutive month.

Internet Explorer now has 67.55 percent of global browser market share, a drop of over seven percentage points in a year, according to figures from Web metrics company Net Applications, released Monday. Mozilla's Firefox browser, meanwhile, has gained market share in the same time frame, climbing over three percentage points to 21.53 percent.

Microsoft's browser has steadily lost ground to its competitors in the past year. Its share dropped sharply in both October and November 2008, when it lost over one percentage point in each month.

Apple's Safari browser now stands at 8.29 percent, up from 7.13 percent in November, when IE dipped. Safari has gained share more quickly than Firefox in that period: Mozilla's browser accounted for 20.78 percent of browser use three months ago, and now has 21.53 percent.

Google's Chrome browser, launched in September 2008, now has 1.12 percent of the market, having overtaken Opera in November. Opera's share of the market now stands at 0.7 percent.

Internet Explorer's drop of seven percentage point since February last year is a continuing trend. Microsoft lost over nine percent of browser market share in the preceding two years.

Most of IE's drop in the past year has been in Internet Explorer 6, which fell from 30.63 percent last February to 19.21 percent this January. Internet Explorer 7 has gained market share overall over the same time period, rising from 44.03 percent to 47.32 percent.

Microsoft launched the first release candidate for Internet Explorer 8 last week. It hopes to regain lost ground by adding features such as private browsing and a cross-site scripting filter.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Apple probably isn't looking to challenge the two top search engines in the world with an add-on to its Safari browser.

(Credit: Apple )

There's little doubt that Apple has thousands of engineers working on all kinds of crazy stuff down in Cupertino, Calif., but are they really planning to take on Google?

That's the theory sort of advanced by TechCrunch on Thursday, with a post titled "Is Apple building a search engine?" Michael Arrington cites "multiple (if thin)" reports that Apple is working on developing its own search technology, presumably to get around using Google as the default search engine in the Safari browser.

The report, however, debunks itself, noting that Apple has not been hiring search engineers in the volumes that would be required to develop anything competitive with Google. The more likely conclusion, according to TechCrunch, is that Apple is working on a way to present search results more in line with the user interface on the iPhone and iPod Touch. That makes a degree of sense, though it's a far cry from the initial headline.

Updated at 12:20 p.m.: I should have linked to this story from yesterday about Google tweaking its search interface for the iPhone, it points out how the search interface can be made easier to read.

Forget the Detroit Auto Show. There are plenty of Chrome watchers in Mountain View, Calif.

With Google's on Tuesday, an onslaught of reviews followed. And the results largely point to a speedy machine, but one not without its flaws.

Don Reisinger's blog on TechCrunch not only applauds the speed of the browser, but also its simplicity:

The first thing that will strike you about Chrome is its soft, yet elegant interface. Unlike other browsers, which sport clutter, Chrome doesn't do anything of the sort. Instead, it makes tabs the primary element of the software, which can be dragged around and moved as needed on the fly. You can already do that in Safari, but in Chrome, it's simply much easier.

But closely followed technology reviewer Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital noted that while Chrome beats Microsoft's Internet Explorer on speed, it doesn't do the same when compared with Firefox or Safari on such frequent tasks as launching Web pages.

And Mossberg's takeaway? Here's his 10,000-foot view:

My verdict: Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version--which is just a beta, or test, release--is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later. These omissions include a way to manage bookmarks, a command for e-mailing links and pages directly from the browser, and even a progress bar to show how much of a Web page has loaded.

A similar sentiment was expressed by John Brandon, in his Computerworld blog. The Chrome reviewer had some reservations:

Chrome has not crashed on me at all. What it has done is make me want to switch back to Firefox to do some "real" work. I can't really explain why. I don't like the tabs being above the address bar because it feels like they are floating in space. Little things bug me. I can drag-and-drop a URL onto the "bookmark bar" but I can't click and hold on the Gmail icon and drag it there, like you can with Firefox. The icon for Chrome looks too much like the one for Google Desktop and not that distinct. I like having a separate search box, and having just one for URLs and search is jarring.

And security concerns have arisen in the early review returns. Ryan Naraine and Dancho Danchev made this observation in their Zero Day blog on ZDNet:

Just hours after the release of Google Chrome, researcher Aviv Raff discovered that he could combine two vulnerabilities--a flaw in Apple Safari (WebKit) and a Java bug discussed at this year's Black Hat conference--to trick users into launching executables direct from the new browser.

As a result, some folks may want to wait for the follow-on model...

Google Chrome is a warning shot over the bows of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

The open-source software project, to be detailed later Tuesday at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it's less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies is now on the battlefield.

So how does Chrome change the competitive landscape?

Google Chrome has many competitors to contend with, according to these August stats.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Initially at least, it's not likely to change the market share rankings. According to Net Applications' browser market share statistics for August, IE has 72 percent share, Firefox 20 percent, Safari 6 percent, and Opera 1 percent.

But even before Google's browser became available for download, its repercussions were traversing the industry. There are plenty of implications from a company as large as Google that builds a browser tuned to advance the company's agenda of Web-based applications.

Here are some possible implications for the four major alternatives to Chrome.

Internet Explorer
IE still claims the dominant share of the browser market, and it still has the hard-to-beat distribution channel of being built into the most widely used operating system.

Firefox has been chipping away at IE's share for years, but the dominance has remained fairly secure, and unless Chrome offers revolutionary new abilities, it's not likely to do more than perhaps increase the chipping rate a bit.

Microsoft has lit a fire under its IE team, and given that Google is such a powerful Microsoft rival, that fire doubtless will burn all the hotter because of Chrome. The forthcoming IE 8, with beta 2 released last week and the final version officially due to ship by the end of January, is a sign of how serious Microsoft is.

Officially, Microsoft welcomes the competition. "The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online," Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer general manager, said in a statement.

Vast numbers of people haven't upgraded from IE 6, which is ancient in Internet years. That cuts both ways for Microsoft: it's hard to get people to upgrade to IE 7 much less to IE 8, but those folks aren't moving to the competition either.

Of course, with Google's Web application agenda, the bigger long-term threat is to Microsoft's Office team, not to its IE team.

Firefox
Firefox potentially stands to lose the most from Chrome.

It's the leading alternative to IE and the standard bearer for those who love open-source software and revile Microsoft's technology, its business practices, and its philosophy. If you're hell-bent on taking down Microsoft, you could pick worse allies than Google.

Mozilla has something for the philosophical purists that Google lacks, though: a measure of independence. "Uniquely in this market, we're a public-benefit, nonprofit group, with no other agenda or profit motive at all," Mozilla Corp. Chief Executive John Lilly said in a blog posting Monday.

Survival is a powerful motive even if profit isn't, though, and the Mozilla Foundation, the parent of the Mozilla Corp., relies on Google for tens of millions of dollars each year in exchange for prominent placement of Google in the browser's search. Happily for Mozilla, Google just signed up for three more years of subsidizing Mozilla, so Firefox and other foundation activities should be financially sound at least for the time being.

Firefox has built a massive grassroots fan base, though. And even Google, for all its charisma, money, and power, will have a hard time replicating that.

Finally, though Chrome at first blush is bad news for Firefox, there's a subtler reality at play: IE is the dominant browser, and the greater the number of credible underdogs that exist, the more that dominance can't be taken for granted. Don't be surprised to hear Mozilla and Google present themselves more as allies than foes.

Safari
Apple has expanded its Safari ambitions from Mac OS X to Windows, most notably by letting the browser hitch a ride along with the iTunes update software. However, Safari has yet to become a force to be reckoned with.

But Safari could benefit indirectly from Chrome: both browsers are based on the open-source WebKit rendering engine.

If Google sponsors aggressive Webkit development--and doesn't end up wrestling with Apple for power over the project--both browsers stand to gain. Google's Android browser for mobile phones, it should be noted, also is based on WebKit.

Opera
Opera has a small share of the browser market, so it's the most likely to drop in position if Google Chrome catches on. It already fights for relevance against the bigger players.

But Opera is a scrappy company. Not surprisingly, it prefers to look at its own growth rather than its sliver of share, and CEO Jon Tetzchner points out that its share has grown each time a new browser has emerged as a viable competitor to Internet Explorer.

"Last year, we had more than 50 percent growth in our user base," Tetzchner said. "I think we'll do quite well this year as well. It seems every time there's talk of new browsers, that's been a positive thing for us. It has been good there is focus on browser alternatives."

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

As promised in May, Google has brought the open-source Gears technology to Apple's Safari, augmenting some browser abilities such as using Gears-tailored Web sites while offline.

The company announced a beta version of Gears for Safari (DMG file download link) on the Gears users mailing list Monday.

"We would love for you to install it and test it and file bug reports so we can polish it and find all the corner cases," said Google's Jeremy Moskovich.

Gears extends a browser so, for example, some Google Docs can be edited or viewed while the user isn't connected to a network. It also can speed up use of the WordPress blogging software and some operations at MySpace, and Google is expanding its scope to geolocation services and other areas, too.

The software requires Safari 3.1.1 on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 or Leopard 10.5.3, he said.

Gears already works on Firefox and Internet Explorer; Opera is working on a version for both its desktop and mobile browsers.

(Via Google Operating System.)