After seven long years of the Browser Wars, a winner has definitely emerged. While it won't surprise a lot of people, it will probably shock many in the 'Net tech and design communities who have always favored Netscape. The handsdown winner is Internet Explorer. Though Netscape (now owned by AOL Time Warner) sued Microsoft in a failed attempt to stop Microsoft from using its superior market share to shove all browsers aside, the attempt failed, and failed badly.

Based on page requests for a recent period:

• Internet Explorer 92.496%
• Netscape 6.165%
• Opera 1.202%
• Assorted (spyders) 0.121%
• Konqueror 0.008%
• Assorted (not spyders) 0.008%

The IE hegemony may actually be helping the public at large. Instead of needing to seek out multiple experts when they need help with their browsers, most likely a single Microsoft oriented help site can answer most (or all) of their questions. The downside is that IE uses an unusual and potentially dangerous plugin strategy - ActiveX. Unlike regular plugins, when ActiveX installs corrupted, it can take days to figure out how to fix it. If you're one of the first people to have the problem, usually no one knows how to help you. In addition, driveby installations of virii via ActiveX are a favorite of malicious sites. Also, because IE will ignore minor errors and guess what the missing or incorrect code should be, a very unrealistic picture of how the page will render in NS and Opera is seen. Just because it works perfect in IE does NOT mean it works good (or if a table error, at all) in Netscape (NS) nor Opera.

It's been noted by most observers, the real losers have always been webdevelopers. As IE veers further and further into proprietarily unique formats, plugins and page structures it makes it incredibly difficult for developers to keep pages easily cross-browser compatible. Estimates suggest that fully half of all webdevelopment budgets are wasted making pages render similarly for IE, Netscape and Opera. If IE had remained with the original HTML/X-HTML/CSS/CSS2 standards and avoided proprietary extensions, just validating a page would have made it cross-browser compatible.