Microsoft, Web Browser | featured news

The topic of site support for IE6 has had a lot of discussion on the web recently as a result of a post on Digg. Why would anyone run an eight-year old browser? Should sites continue to support it?

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times.

Microsoft is the company that invented the concept of launching a beta product in order to build up traction for the final product.

Power browsers are coming. And they'll look mighty familiar. Software is supposed to be a mature industry, characterized by some sort of mono- or duopoly. How to explain, then, the activity around Web browsers. Three of the tech industry's biggest names -- Microsoft, Google and Apple -- each has a significant in-house browser development effort, with periodic fresh releases.