Few days back I was in Bangalore for TechEd, and saw the demo of what IE9 could do and started wondering about who will win browser war this time, here is what I think.
Nobody.
We all know who won the first web browser war, but that was then and the real fight was between just two Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator and only one platform.
Now there are 5 major contenders,
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Internet Explorer
- Safari
- Opera
And two major platforms desktop and mobile.
Personally I am only excited about the fight between Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox, and to see how they push web forward.
So what will really happen?
Well, they are all going to end up following the same common standards for which HTML 5 is the blanket term. There will be some hiccups/incompatibilities before this happens, but it will happen.
To me this is the only outcome that makes the most economic sense, as they(Microsoft, Google, Apple) all move there native application to web they will want to make sure that the features they are going to use is available on all the browsers as part of standards.
While right now focus of war is on desktop browser in a year or two it will shift to mobile(phones and tablets) and this is when it will become even more interesting.
What do you think, do you really see a single winner in this war of web?