Best browser?

Many people want to know what is the best browser to use, it can be very confusing as there are many different browsers on the market. In this blog, I'm going to talk about the current browser market share and how it has evolved to over the years.

The competition between different browsers are generally know colloquially as browser war. There has been two major browser wars. The first war was between Internet explorer and Netscape Navigator. Prior to the release of windows 95, Netscape was the dominant browser at the time, however Microsoft release Windows 95 with Internet Explorer built in, since than Netscape started to decline and IE became the dominant browser. 

The second browser war was less obvious than the first, there are a lot more players in the second war, IE, Firefox which was Netscape open source successor, Safari from Apple and Opera. The second war started in 2004 when Firefox 1 was released, the second war ended in 2009, IE was still the winner in the second war but its market share has been declining to a little more than 50%. 

The third war started in 2010 with the emergence of HTML5, the smartphone revolution and the emergence of Google Chrome. Google Chrome continue to grow and take share away from IE over a very short amount of time. The reasons behind Chrome's success is that it is open source, very fast release cycle, just a few month compared to IE which usually takes one or two years to release a new version and most importantly speed.

Green colour is where Google Chrome is dominant, blue is where IE is dominant browser.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Ming Ren