The browser market is looking a bit confused right now, with “true web” on smartphones and IE7 strenghtening IE’s dominance of web and other players shuffling around. All while Google hands money to all for having that search box there in the toolbar.

The next major version of Firefox, 3.0, will probably be released somewhere around November. Jeremy wrote about Firefox’s first alpha back in April here, where he pointed out some of its promised killer-features. The tech world changes quickly and now it seems that it’s the Firefox team that should watch out for the competitors.

In my opinion, Firefox 2.0 was a big let-down compared to 1.5, which was full of potential. The release of IE7 didn’t make things any easier - while still inferior, IE7 is almost “good enough”. The news that of those, who download Firefox, 50% don’t even try it and of the rest, 75% don’t stay on Firefox? Still, Firefox seems to be gaining some ground in some countries, f.e. having a respectable 45,4% market share in Finland (making Finland #2 adopter after Slovakia’s 47,9%) (Netherlands on the other hand is trailing last with 14,6%).

But, focusing on these numbers sounds like major change from the Firefox of yesterday, the rebel browser. Since when did Firefox’s goal change from making a good product to getting a higher market share? In my opinion, these tactics start to sound more evil and more like, well, Microsoft. Is Firefox getting too arrogant? Is the focus on dumbing down the browser for the masses affecting the project? With Firefox going for volume, the other players (except for IE, which needs to do nothing) are going for niches, like Opera is doing. This would seem to put Apple’s Safari between rock and a hard place. I mean, what’s Apple after with Safari’s Windows version?

Safari on Windows wasn’t the only surprise from Apple to the crowded browser market. It seems that practically out of nowhere, Apple’s open-sourced WebKit framework is becoming more and more popular where Firefox’s Gecko used to. First, WebKit came back to its roots after KDE decided to “unfork” WebKit and KHTML. Other notable players joined the WebKit lovefest as Nokia has used WebKit for a while on its mobile browsers and now even the guys at OLPC are planning to ditch Gecko in favour of less resource-intensive WebKit. I think this is a good example of what open-source is about, but not in the traditional sense (freedom). In my opinion that the power of open-source lies in the trend of abandoning the DIY-principle, which is deeply trenched in the traditional software engineering. There should be no reason to reinvent an inferior wheel.

Of course, Safari for Windows will probably stay as a niche product, but in course, Apple has pushed yet another framework on Windows ecosystem (QuickTime and Bonjour being other examples). On desktop Linux side, things get more interesting. Because WebKit is “just” a rendering engine, the developers of KDE and others can avoid another Firefox/IceWeasel-drama and yet get solid engine that’s gaining serious clout on the browser market. There are plans to make WebKit for Linux through Qt, for example. The day when you can download a plugin for Firefox to render pages instead with WebKit (like you can use IE’s renderer on Windows) are getting nearer. Is this a good sign for Firefox?

That WebKit seems to be more and more favoured in mobile and other low resource environments, like the OLPC, is something the developers are probably really proud about. This also pits it against Opera, who has tried to make a market by developing its browser for mobile phones (Opera Mobile and Mini ) and others, notably Wii. Of course, Opera offers a solid product for its markets, while WebKit is meant for developers. Of course, being a framework, WebKit doesn’t have to worry about what its icon label says and can so focus on things that really matter, like security and web standards.

Remember that tabbed browsing, pop-up blockers and rss readers have very little to do with the renderer and are just parts of the browser software. This means that while the current business model of search box revenue in Firefox, Opera and Safari seems to be viable solution for browsers, there’s no such thing for open-source framework. This is a real threat to Firefox’s future and also the reason why IE6′s legacy will ruin web experience for years to come. It’s really hard to justify investment into something that’s not visible and means very little to the end-user, who in IE’s and Firefox’s case are their users. So, why does Apple care?

This is something that I think is great about open source license and how they are not really “free”. By forking KHTML, Apple could rapidly build up a browser that was up to the web standards of its day and not reinvent a whell, but they could focus on what Apple is good at, designing the application. While they could get their hands on the code for free, it came with a cost, which was that they had to share their modifications to the world as KHTML is licensed under LGPL. Now that iPhone is out of the door and it too uses WebKit, it’s easy to see why Apple worked to make the engine as smooth and light as possible. As a side effect, other organizations interested in light browser framework adopted the code. WebKit’s open-sourceness and features are not driven by Apple’s good-will, but it’s features align with it’s own needs and by license-necessity it needs to redistribute the source. Of course, it can be argued that Apple goes a little bit further than expected by the license only, but still, it’s good keep in mind that corporations (not even Apple) are by definition only interested in their shareholder value.

Take for example Google’s open source manager, who said at a recent conference, ”We have enough engineering resources that, if the license has obligations we are not interested in, we can just not use it”. It’s a safe bet to say that KTHML’s license was something that suited Apple. The only upside for Apple for others adopting WebKit is the possibility that wider market reach equals to more websites that are coded so that Safari shows the correctly. While this is good for Safari’s users, I don’t think it’s any major concern for Apple – Safari is, after all, just the browser that ships with Mac OS X and the only profit-incentive are Google’s search revenues, by a long shot not an important source for Apple’s profits (unlike for Opera and especially for Mozilla Corp.).

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