Content Management Matters ™

It was about mid-December, just after Opera Software filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft -- partly focused on Internet Explorer not following web standards -- that Microsoft finally came out and publicly announced their support for key web standards in version 8 of their prolific web browser.

With the recent release of IE8's first Beta the public can now finally find out for themselves just how well they have done that. What is even more interesting -- and perhaps a matter of debate -- is that they have done it in such a way as to not "Break the Web." Or in other words, they plan to deliver IE8 with backwards compatibility by introducing a controversial third operating mode.

Two browser-related stories broke while you were all making merry over the festive season.
Microsoft, under pressure from agitated developers, finally took steps to ensure compliance for IE8 with web standards, breaking long-held traditions.

Then AOL quietly announced that Netscape was being cut loose to pass into the cold hereafter, as they announced the end of support for the once-preeminent browser marque which introduced the world to the Web.

The browser wars continue as the Mozilla Foundation, also known as the Rebel Alliance, releases the second beta of the upcoming 3.0 version of Firefox.

No longer considered an upstart competitor to Internet Explorer, the open source web browser has enjoyed steadily increasing market share and continues to be the browser of choice for those web workers fortunate enough to not be trapped behind a corporate firewall.

User Interface improvements in the beta include:

• Improved security with an upgraded Password Manager, automatic version checking of plugins and extensions, anti-virus integration with Download Manager, and the new Effective Top-Level Domain (eTLD) service designed to improve user privacy.
• Enhanced functionality with an upgraded Download Manager, improved rendering of international characters, full page zooming, and an animated tab strip.
• New personalization features with organized browsing using Places, a new organizer for managing history and bookmarks, plus an upgraded location bar.

Beneath the UI, there are two enhancements of particular interest:

1. Implementation of a cycle collector for better memory management. Firefox is known to devour memory a gigabyte at a time. Therefore, any improvement in memory management will be most welcome.
2. Support for offline browsing and web-based protocol handlers. Does this version of Firefox coupled with rich internet applications like Google Apps and Zoho Office Suite finally challenge Microsoft's supreme dominance in desktop productivity arena?

Stay tuned and find out.

35.4% versus 34.9%

Those numbers are cause celebre for every open source advocate and Microsoft hater across the globe.

According to the most recent set of browser usage statistics from W3Schools, Firefox has captured 35.4% of the browser market as compared to 34.9% for Internet Explorer version 6.

As exciting as this news is, the trends show that it was only a matter of time before Firefox took the lead in the race between the two most widely deployed browsers in the world.

Is Microsoft concerned? Probably more than they would ever admit. Regardless of the viability of these statistics, the Firefox development team deserves some major kudos for bringing some much needed competition to the web browser space.

How worried should Microsoft be about their declining marketshare and how satisifed should the Mozilla Foundation be with their growth? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Oh man, I can see the IE7 Program Managers' heads spinning right now. Google has done some tricks in the dev shop with Microsoft's latest browser and gone and released a Googlified version of IE7.