Will iPhone Ignite a New Browser War?

iPhone is expected to become a popular mobile phone set right away and Apple is expecting that millions of iPhones will be sold in the next one year. In fact, Apple is expecting that they would be able to sell 10 million iPhones annually. I will not be surprised if Apple can do so.

As you already know that the browser of iPhone will be Safari, the browser developed by Apple. So, in the mobile –phone segment, Safari will be able to grow its user base significantly overnight. A radical shift in the mobile phone industry is going these days. More and more users are getting connected to Internet with their mobile phones. So, the market is getting larger. So, many users who never used or even saw Safari will get familiar with the browser.

Apple has recently introduced Safari for users of Windows Operating system. Thus, many iPhone users will first get familiar with Safari in their mobile phone and some of them may actually use Safari in their desktop computers too. This can help Apple to increase its market share in the browser market.

IT News wrote:

According to Jobs, there are 18 million Safari users. Safari accounts for a 5 per cent share of the browser market while Internet Explorer has 78 per cent, Firefox has 15 per cent, and other browsers like Opera and The Omni Group's OmniWeb compose the remaining 2 per cent.

Ethan Schoonover, a conference attendee and developer who blogs at kinkless.com, said he expected that the addition of Windows support would help Safari make inroads in enterprise environments where many IT managers remain wary of open source projects like Firefox.

But it seems likely that sales of iPhones will boost Safari's adoption more than the browser's newfound corporate appeal. If Apple sells 10 million iPhones in a year as projected, Safari's installed base will rise by over 50%, not including Windows users who decide to install it on their PCs.

However, not everyone shares the enthusiasm of Steve Jobs. Mitch Wagner feels that Windows Users Don't Care About Safari. He feels that most Windows users are happy with IE, Firefox and Opera and they would not want to even try Safari unless Safari provides something extraordinary for the users.

He wrote:

Moreover, Apple boasts that Safari renders Web pages significantly faster than either IE7 or Firefox 2.

But still: The features Apple brags about with Safari, or very similar features, are available either standard or with browser extensions in Firefox.

And, as for performance ... I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it just doesn't matter much. We're not living in the days when a 28.8-Kbps modem was standard; most of us have high-speed Internet connections at home and in the office. I don't really care about page-rendering speed, and I don't hear about other people caring either. (People do care about throughput for multimedia files, of course, but that's a whole different matter.)

I'm not predicting a rush for people to adopt Safari on Windows.

I agree with Mitch Wagner partially. There are many news users in Internet all the time. If they hear good things about Safari from others then some of them will try Safari anyway. If Safari can give good speed in surfing then many people like me will surely go for it. Right now, I use Opera as it is faster than IE and Firefox (at least, I have seen this matter in my own surfing experience). If I find that Safari is faster than even Opera, I would not mind using it.

So, let us go back to the original question- Will iPHones ignite a browser war? I think it will. Until now, Safari was totally limited to Mac users. Now, Safari is going spread among Windows users and iPhone users. It will increase the market share of Safari and on the other hand, it will make Safari more familiar to us.

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