NOW Toronto: Battle of the browsers

[marmar]

Battle of the browsers
Firefox, RockMelt and the new web wars

By Joshua Errett


This week, the fantastic Firefox celebrated its sixth birthday as a browser.

But sadly, this is no time for cake. The team of Firefox developers, many working in the Mozilla offices on Spadina Avenue, are in a heated battle for users in an increasingly crowded field. With Firefox 4 delayed till 2011, the Mozilla team has to beat down a brand new social-media-friendly browser, RockMelt.

A new browser, yes, but there’s a very familiar face behind it.

Here’s how it all breaks down.

Originally titled Phoenix, Firefox grew out of the browser Netscape Navigator (it originally shared the source code).

Netscape, we all remember, was brutally murdered by Internet Explorer in the late 1990s Browser Wars. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/webjam.cfm?content=177764

[bemildred]

1. Fads come and go.

I like Firefox, I use it exclusively, but there are dozens and dozens of browsers out there, and more coming all the time. Being the owner of a popular web browser is one of the true bases of Internet power, and the barriers to entry are relatively low, so it makes sense that it's a very competitive field.

[Urban Prairie]

2. Not joining Facebook just to use this browser.

Too many others I like, and this one is just a modified version of the Google Chrome browser. The social-friendly "Flock" browser likely is similar to Rockmelt, and can be downloaded with the ability to use either the Firefox Gecko .xpi or the Chrome .crx extensions. I also like Linux' Konqueror, Opera, (Opera Tor for privacy) Avant (IE-engine), Seamonkey (Mozilla branch) and Orca (Mozilla branch) browsers. In fact the third party software firewall that I use on my WinXP Professional OS (Comodo) has also recently developed their own downloadable version of the Chrome browser, named Comodo Dragon.