As mobile devices take an ever increasing share of people’s internet time, the internet browser war seems to have fallen by the wayside. I spent more than a decade in the high-tech battlefield. I understand the ephemeral nature of these epic battles. My personal battle revolved around ATM switching vs. IP routing as the telecom/IT infrastructure choice. Even the few of you who might remember the rather one-sided battle have probably relegated it to the deep recesses of your memory – somewhere between the first phone number you ever dialed and the last time you had your oil changed. FWIW, I was on the losing end.
We may no longer be in a world split between two opposing military and political superpowers, but according to 51 Degrees.com we’re quickly approaching a bi-polar world with respect to PC web browser preferences.
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That said, I’m a Firefox user. That places me in the company of some of the less accessible countries like Iran, Cuba, and Myanmar. To be fair for some reason Firefox is also popular in Germany and Poland as well as a few equatorial nations. In some of the earlier maps for browser popularity, dating back to 2011, Firefox dominated Europe and was a much bigger player in Africa. Perhaps the nearly continuous restarts for updates and security patches have finally caught up with Firefox.
Those older maps also included Opera, a particularly popular browser in the former Soviet republics. It remained number one in Belarus until several years ago. I suspect that Internet Explorer’s ties to Microsoft Windows and Chrome’s connection to Google, the dominant operating system and search engines respectively, are like the nuclear arsenals of the former superpowers, simply too much for Firefox and Opera to compete with. Of course even as this battle settles the new and perhaps more important fight for the mobile users starts. Have you already moved on to mobile for everything? Or like me, do you still stubbornly cling to your keypad, laptop, or maybe even a mouse?
As always thanks for reading.
Armen