browser-wars-and-new-words

Browser Wars, and New Words

You've probably heard of Firefox. It's a vaguely new open-source browser from the Mozilla project (Mozilla in turn being an open-sourced next-gen Netscape) which has gained significant market-share in the last couple of years, introducing things like tabbed browsing to a mass market and forcing Microsoft to revive its moribund browser division, producing Internet Explorer 7.

You can see Firefox's success here:


Note that it is mirrored by renewed interest in Internet Explorer:


And the strange new word 'tabbed' rises with it:


Here's Netscape's decline (the spike is something to do with a portal website):


For completeness, Safari (Apple browser):


And Opera:



Internet Explorer 7 duplicates many of Firefox's features, and will be on every new (Windows) computer soon. So the Firefox thing may not last too long. Its legacy, though, may be that word 'tabbed'. :)

(All images are from my News Trends site, and are derived from Google News Archive. There are various other trends graphed there, too.)