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Microsoft has been the king of the browser market with over 75% of market in its pocket. But tides seem to be shifting into a heating competition with an advent of innovation over standard and age old outlooks of web browsers.

Mozilla, after spending three years in developing and another six months of public testing is ready to launch FireFox 3.0. It is said to have tricks that would revolutionize the way people browse and organize the sites they most often visit.

Apple, itself plans at moving out of the nutshell into the global arena of PCs with its browser, Safari (a pretty hard push). And amidst all this rapid expansion and development within its rivals, Microsoft launched the public test version of its latest Explorer with the finished Internet Explorer 8 to be in market by the end of this year.

According to Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures; the outlook of browsers hasn’t changed much during the last decade and the only thing that would decide any browsers success would be innovation.

FireFox has 18% share in the browser market; which clearly shows that people prefer downloading it; where as Microsoft’s Explorer comes installed from the factories in most PCs.

To add to this, FireFox is fast gaining on the financial and strategic value of the browser. According to Mozilla’s 2006 tax documentation, Google paid $65million in return of Mozilla introducing the Google Search box in its browser.

With the latest trend having e-mail, word processing sifting over to the Internet, developers think that in due time all users would need is a browser to do all the work.

This has re-ignited the browser wars and thus an explosion in innovation. FireFox 3.0 is twice as fast and takes half the memory than its predecessor and has additional features like, awesome bar that automatically maintains three months of browsing history. Smart! It relieves the user of the hectic task, that of maintaining a huge list of bookmarks. And it can be personalized to meet the needs of an individual user.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 comes bundled with new features, like activities that allow users to highlight text on page and send it to any site, mail or blog with just a click (and its only one of the many features it might have).

Apple with 5% of the market share has developed a strategy to rise in the war of browsers and already their market share on Window’s PCs has trebled.

With the ground being set for the battle of browsers; all we can do is wait and watch; what innovative browser is worth our money?

via New York Times