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Like a good Hollywood blockbuster franchise, the browsers wars will never end, the sequels just keep coming. Most people probably think the browser wars ended almost a decade ago and while today's browsers may not be slinging mud like in the days of yore, 2006 was nevertheless a big year for browsers.
Everybody's favorite browser underdog, the rebel alliance of the browser franchise, Firefox went 2.0 this year amid a PR push George Lucas would've envied. Firefox 2.0 saw massive release parties and even television commercials which might make it the only browser to reach prime time.
The verdict on 2.0 was mixed however with many users complaining of stability issues and frequent crashes. Mozilla has since released and update to address those problems.
Never one to rest on its laurels, the open source brain child of Blake Ross has already released an early alpha build of Firefox 3.0. The new version won't be consumer ready until next year, but the buzz has already started.
Not to be outdone, the sleeping behemoth up in Redmond updated itself for the first time in five years, promptly breaking the web.
Yes that's right, Microsoft's Internet Explorer reached version 7.0 leading some to speculate that IE is progressing in dog, rather than human years.
Web designers everywhere scrambled to find lost FTP passwords to update all the things IE7 broke in their code. A laundry list of CSS and javascript hacks were rendered useless by IE7 forcing designers back to the drawing boards.
Still unable to comprehend the W3C's specs for the "box model," IE7 was not the standards compliant offering many had hoped for, but it did bring some exciting new features.
Well, exciting if you've been in a coma for the last half decade.
IE 7 claims to introduce its user to the exciting new worlds of RSS and tabbed browsing, never mind that nearly every other browser has considered such "features" standard faire for the four years.
Showing signs that they may be drinking too much of their own Kool Aid, Microsoft even filed a patent application of this cool new -- er, decade-old, as the case may be -- technology, RSS.
The Empire marches forward.
With the big two stealing all the headlines it might be easy to overlook the startling achievements of Opera. Opera may not have much in the way of desktop market share, but don't count Opera out yet, the browsing-via-game-console realm is just opening up and Opera is well positioned to be a major player.
Opera released version 9.0 of it's desktop browser this year but they also debuted Opera Mini, Opera mobile, Opera embedded on the Wii, the Sony mylo, and the Nintendo DS.
Opera never seems to run out of new places to explore -- heck we have a top secret version of Opera running on our toaster here at the office.
Opera would get our Han and Chewy award for innovation and hair-brained experimental goodness, were we to have such an award.
The "social browser" Flock wins our Bart and Lisa Simpson "are we there yet, are we there yet" award for failing to make 1.0 once again. It also made our vapor ware list. Flock, which is based on Firefox, claims they're more interested in features and stability than arbitrary release dates. It sounds good in press releases, but seriously -- where the hell is 1.0?
Clock is in danger of becoming the Jar Jar Binks of the the browser franchise.
Apple's Safari was relatively quiet this year releasing only minor updates to it's streamlined self. Safari is not perfect by any means, but it's close enough that doesn't seem to need massive upgrades. We think of it as the Millennium Falcon of browsers.
Then there's a darn near endless list of niche players in the browser market. Camino, a mac browser based on the Gecko rendering engine, hit 1.0 in February. Camino users swear by it and it's still the best choice for GMail and AJAX apps on old Mac hardware.
Rodney Dangerfield shouldn't be part of the browsers-as-Star-Wars-franchise metaphor and yet how else can you characterize Browzar? Browzar was released in early Summer to favorable reviews in the blogosphere, but was outed a week later as a lousy piece of adware. Silly bloggers.
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