mediajunk

Ben Hammersley, writing in the Guardian last week, asked whether recent setbacks in the growth and popularity of the Internet Explorer browser were indications of larger storms a-brewin:

The tiniest shift, history shows us, can signal the greatest change. News last weekend that Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser had lost a single percentage point of market share might not sound all that significant today, but it could well mean the browser wars are back on. One percent is all it takes.
...
With its immense market share, IE has an enormous effect on the ecosystem of the internet. Development is being slowed: differences in the way IE treats certain technical standards compared with the more modern systems, means that web designers must be continually aware of work-arounds and hacks to get things to work, and online security is seriously damaged. Screens full of pop-up adverts, automatically installing spyware, and unstoppable redirects to porn sites, are all due to problems with IE.
...
[So] why did Microsoft stop developing Internet Explorer? Why would a company so vocal about innovation cease work on perhaps the most used application in the world, and for nearly three years? The answer is not definitive, but the prevailing thinking points to the third aspect of the browser war: it is the beginning of an even larger, if deeply curious, battle for the domination of the entire computer industry.
...
However, what would happen if people's web browsers were capable of running complex applications, with code based on openly published specifications? Two things: first, the operating system would become irrelevant, so there would be no need to upgrade to the next version of Windows, and second, the playing field for everything else would be thus levelled. The majority of Microsoft's business, therefore, could have been threatened if the IE browser team had continued past 2001.

Hammersly goes on to make some points I've raised in Mediajunk before -- that Google's Gmail is an example of a web application that replaces the need for a local hard drive, among other things. There have been rumours, too, that Google is developing a complete operating system. Hardly true, but it is easy to see how Google can muscle in on Microsoft's territory, how the browser, if it was capable of richer functionality, could eventually replace the operating system.

Hammersly's point is that Microsoft may have recognised this threat before anyone else -- hence why they stopped developing the IE browser once they had won the browser wars. The first browser wars, that is. Could we soon have BW2?