Browse beaten

By J.F., P.K. and D.H.

The browser wars enter a new era with a whimper

COMPUTING in the 1990s was dominated by a fight between Netscape and Microsoft over who would control people's online experience via the web browser on their computers. Yet the battle that got Microsoft into so much antitrust trouble didn't end but faded away: its browser market share has plummeted, first because of competition from Mozilla Firefox, and over the past five years from Google Chrome. The dramatic change is apparent when mapped over time with the most popular browser by country, presented in the interactive infographic above. Chrome has even pulled away users from Firefox, as the chart below shows. Yet like all empires in technology, Google's too shall pass. (See

article

.)