Wednesday, March 26, 2008

It's the Browser not the OS anymore

After seeing a post on Safari for Windows at Because I said So and now this post on the AT&T Pogo browser at Techcrunch I started thinking. What is Apple thinking and especially AT&T what am I missing, why would these large Internet players want to get into the middle of the desktop browser wars. Well It's the Browser not the OS anymore, if you can own the browser which is where many of us live, you own the user for the near future. So what better way to do that then to have a browser that is as similar as possible on your desktop and your PDA/phone. Speaking of the PDA you have browser wars heating up there also. You have a private beta of the Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile and eventually Symbian, next is Firefox Mobile which is suppose to be out sometime this year. Then there is Opera which has a browser version for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows Mobile and many phones. But what about Microsoft and IE, IE for Mac had support discontinued in 2006 and Microsoft has never had a direct Linux version. But there is IEs 4 Linux which allows you to run IE5 through IE7 on Linux. So one question is will Microsoft sit around while Apple moves in on Windows with Safari or will Microsoft buy what it needs to fight on all fronts in this round of browser wars. The other question is what will Microsoft arch rival Google do, is Google working on developing a browser from scratch, that doesn't seem to be there style based on what I read. Instead after reading this article at Read WriteWeb about Google and Opera, you wonder if Google is now going after Opera or still working on Firefox or maybe Google buys both Opera and Firefox to keep them from Microsoft. Add it all up and this year looks to be very exciting in the browser world.

Let me know who else we should add to the scorecard I'm sure I have missed some of the players.

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