IE9, Firefox 4.0, Chrome 6.0, Opera 10.70 – Browser Race on Steroids
It’s the same old browser-eat-browser world, but the pace at which the main market players are unveiling new moves has changed considerably, compared to just a few years ago. The continuously accelerating browser race hasn’t left anyone without breath yet, with Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Opera stepping up their game to keep up with each other. But there’s little doubt over the fact that the game itself has changed to suit a new, instant gratification-focused world.
Mobility. It automatically implies additional characteristics, as adaptability; high speed for the introduction of innovation; and modern browsers to take the experiences on the world wide web further. Not only are interim testing releases, nightly builds and development milestones succeeding one another at a fast pace, but pressure is on browser makers to catalyze the evolution of their respective applications as fast as possible.
Immobility. Not the perception that customers should get from any of the top browser vendors worldwide, not that any of them would afford it. In the past, Microsoft has seen its fair share of criticism for holding the web back, in part also because of the IE6 to IE7 gap. But after unveiling the pre-release versions of IE9, it is clear that the Redmond company has changed the strategy for building IE, falling in line with rivals.
Chrome 6.0
I think it’s safe to say that the introduction of another player on the browser market has brought new, healthy and welcomed competition. Synonymous with Internet search, Google unveiled its own open source web browser, dubbed Chrome, less than two years ago, in September 2008. In the past couple of years, the Mountain View-based search giant has delivered major version after major version, relentlessly. Google Chrome 6.0 is currently under development, and if the company keeps up the pace, v.10.0 will be here in no time at all.
Google has already been hard at work on version 6.0 of Chrome since May 2010, and even earlier, considering the efforts put into the Chromium open source project that is at the foundation of Chrome. Offered for testing through the Dev channel, Chrome 6.0 will follow the same path to general availability as previous releases before it. In this regard, it will graduate to the Beta channel, before being moved to the Stable channel and offered to end users worldwide, most probably in the next few months, by which time, Google would have already started looking ahead to Chrome 7.0.
Opera 10.70
At the start of July 2010, Opera Software wrapped up and made available for download Opera 10.60. With support for Geolocation, Web Workers and Offline Applications, a new version of the Presto rendering engine, an optimized JavaScript engine and a touched-up UI, Opera 10.60 was offered just a few months after version 10.50.
Opera 10.50’s time in the spotlight was short lived, since it was only released in March, to have a replacement in place just four months later. Still, the Norwegian browser maker has already shifted its focus on the next version of Opera, with the first development snapshots of Opera 10.70 already available for testing by early adopters.
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