With Google Chrome out of Beta, will the browser wars re-ignite?
As was widely reported today, Google announced that they are taking chrome out of Beta after just 100 days. Chief amongst their stats about the Beta program: in the 100 day duration, they saw over 10 million (yes, that means 10,000,000) active users. Whether that means they’re only counting the number of times Chrome was downloaded, or the number of unique users that are now accessing Google’s site with Chrome is unclear. However, even 10 million downloads in just 100 days is fairly impressive, especially given how many Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 users are still out there (25% of the browser market by some accounts). And 100 days is relatively short for a traditional Google Beta, especially given Gmail has been in Beta since April 1, 2004.
A lot of tech news sites have been theorizing that the “browser wars” may begin again, with Chrome, FireFox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 all competing for the highest chunk of the browser market.
While it might create some new innovation in the market, and drive much needed new features into Internet Explorer, I doubt this will re-ignite the same war that happened between Microsoft and Netscape. The late 1990’s battle of the browser titans, Netscape and Internet Explorer, was primarily about one thing: personal revenge. Bill Gates and his team at Microsoft were personally upset with Marc Andreessen’s comments about Windows (being a “poorly debugged set of device drivers” and so on), and the refusal by Andreessen to sell Netscape to Microsoft. Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc. and built Internet Explorer in response to the growing challenge from Netscape. The comments from Andreessen helped fuel the team at Microsoft to work extra hard to come out on top, and the fact that Microsoft could bundle their browser with the OS just helped to seal the deal.
Today, the browser market is a little more crowded. Internet Explorer, FireFox and Apple’s Safari are competing for the top three spots, with Opera and Chrome following close behind Safari. And despite FireFox’s steadily growing usage, up to somewhere around 20-25% of the browser market today, it’s important to remember that 65-70% is still Internet Explorer usage. It’s simply a fact that there are people that use the Internet that don’t really care what browser they are using to get there. It’s all the same Internet to them. Google may be able to use its brand and broad reach to push Chrome usage up, but it will probably come at the cost of FireFox usage first before it affects much of the Internet Explorer user base.
But beyond that, it doesn’t look like Microsoft is that worried about anyone eating away some of their browser share. More and more of their web applications are being cross-certified on FireFox and Safari (and since Chrome uses Safari’s WebKit rendering engine, it’s likely that Chrome will work fine for the most part). And the unfortunate reality is that there isn’t much money in the browser market. Google’s Chrome gives Google the ability to do what Microsoft has done with Internet Explorer: tailor experiences on their web applications to have proprietary hooks so that you get that “it just works better” feeling when using Google Chrome with Google web applications. But there isn’t any money being made: Chrome is free, there’s no additional advertising being displayed (at least not yet), and Google’s one and only business model is to sell advertising.
So what will happen next? Internet Explorer 8 will come out, it’ll probably make webmasters unhappy (and maybe even a few Internet Explorer 6 users that have never experienced Internet Explorer 7’s UI), but it will be a step forward because it adheres to web standards better than any version of Internet Explorer before it. People will use it, and the market share will probably stay around 60-70%. FireFox usage will decline once Chrome gets add-ins, as discussed in an earlier post. And FireFox 3.1 will come out and be faster and better than ever. But not much will change, at least not over the next 3-5 years.
The real war isn’t really about browsers. It’s about what powers the desktop. If Google goes one step further and starts their own Linux desktop, and then pushes Chrome onto it along with a host of productivity tools, that would be the point where we’d see the same kind of massive war that we saw in the late 90’s, with amazing advancements in technology in such a short time.
Filed under: Apple, Consumer Web, Google, Microsoft
Steve: Good post overall but you’re off the mark in two details. First, there’s a second reason that many people use IE: many corporate IT departments force users to use IE. They declare IE (frequently IE6) the official browser and lockdown computers so that users cannot install additional software such as Firefox. As for revenue, you’re also incorrect: Safari and Firefox get paid by the search engines (primarily Google and Yahoo) when people use the built-in search box. This is the primary source of revenue for Firefox. So Google can keep this revenue for themselves when people use Chrome. Furthermore, Chrome encourages people to use Google search and other Google tools, keeping these people on Google websites. Microsoft does the same thing for IE. In effect, the free browser is the hook that gets you to the revenue-producing online services.
@Greg - I agree, Corporate IT definitely enforces IE in some cases, but it’s largely been because their apps didn’t support FireFox. With Microsoft cross-supporting FireFox (and actually doing it pretty well), that might slowly change.
Both Safari and FireFox support other search engines aside from Google, and I’d wonder exactly how much revenue they’re making from referrals to Google. There are plenty of add-in toolbars for FireFox (Yahoo, Ask.com, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.) that would re-direct traffic away from Google.
In terms of revenue producing services: do you really think browser integrations have that much to do with consumer choices about where to go for Internet content? I would imagine most people make decisions based on what works best, not what their browser is recommending them to do… If they were that susceptible to suggestion, then they’re probably not going to be ones switching from Internet Explorer anyway, right?
I think relative to Microsoft’s core businesses, the revenue from Internet Explorer (both direct and indirect) is probably pretty small, especially considering that MS Office alone is a ~$16billion business for them. But I welcome any evidence to the contrary!