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Internet Explorer has just got an overhaul—the most significant in the last five years and Firefox is also getting a new version. Are we headed for another round of browser wars?

In the last few days, we have asked a cross section of people from Internet users to entrepreneurs associated with IT business on how Microsoft’s latest version of Internet Explorer (IE) browser software would change Internet browsing in India?

The general response is though IE 7 has introduced more functionalities that would make browsing easier. But there would be no drastic change in the way people browse.

Onward Novell India Linux practice head Prakash Advani feels IE is a reactive strategy for MS, which has primarily replicated the Firefox features and is weary of its growing market share.

Analysts seem to be confident of Microsoft’s domination in the Indian browser market. Globally, most market estimates peg Mozilla Firefox as the distant second in terms of market share and the rest are too distant to be counted. “Even if Microsoft did not introduce IE 7, it would not have any impact on its market share simply because the users would have continued to use the browser even in the absence of some good functionalities like tabbed browsing,” says Trend Micro country manager, Neeraj Kaushik.

Insiders point out that users are not migrating though the latest version is 18 months late. “People who buy legal Office and Windows normally stick to MS for a single user interface (look and feel) and they normally don’t go for Firefox or any other browser. The majority of Microsoft users are more engaged with Windows and MS Office than IE. For them, the browser is just another tool to access Internet”, says Microsoft reseller Charbria Infotech’s Hemant Chabria.

The reasons are obvious. The market share of IE is directly proportional to the company’s Windows sale. The bundling business has helped Microsoft to maintain a near monopoly situation in the browser market. The legal Microsoft users have to use IE to get the latest updates. Many users who like Firefox but have to use Microsoft desktop and server applications have both the browser on the desktop.

“With around 72% piracy rate, IE has become the default browser. Why would home users download Firefox even it’s available free,” says EMC security division head, RSA’s Srikiran Raghavan.

“Firefox has been able to resist IE’s total monopoly by providing better security features and high browsing speed. FireFox has been able to come up with an alternative to IE,” says Jatayuu Software managing director, Mahesh Jain.

Firefox’s functionalities like tabbed browsing, simple interface and customised configuration were popular. One important area of innovation by Firefox is the creation of more than 100 extensions that support additional functionalities, says Advani.

Though there is no conclusive study on the Indian browser market, IDC head Kapil Dev Singh says, IE could have a marketshare of over 90% in India.

Security, obviously is a hot issue. While Firefox has 42 vulnerabilities, IE has 38, says a recent Symantec study. Firefox takes one day to respond to each security threat compared to average of nine days taken by Microsoft.

IE remains an omnipresent desktop icons for most of us. After its domination goes hand in hand with Microsoft’s desktop applications hegemony in the computing world.

The comScore numbers for top global web properties saw Wikipedia and YouTube pick up 12 percent gains in their unique visitors age 15 and up from around the world.

Microsoft sites still lead the pack, with 505 million visitors arriving in September 2006 according to the comScore numbers. If you are wondering what makes Microsoft so heavily visited, a combination of Automatic Updates and Windows Genuine Advantage checks probably have more to do with that traffic than the MSN Butterfly does.

Yahoo sites edged out Google properties in September, but not by a wide margin. 480 million visitors hit Yahoo’s various properties in the midst of that company’s marketing blitz. Google picked up 467 million visitors to its sites for the month.

Traffic drops into the 200 millions for the next two Internet players. EBay drew 237 million unique visitors to its online marketplace. Time Warner Network, which includes AOL, grabbed 217 million, which should be of some help to AOL’s dreams of a richly profitable ad-supported/audience driven future.

The quartet of properties that followed all managed to break into nine digits for their September traffic. Wikipedia leaped to 154 million visitors, while the online retailer Amazon drew 133 million. Fox Interactive Media includes MySpace in its properties, and brought in 117 million visitors.

Rapidly improving properties associated with Ask.com, including its search services, helped it grab 112 million uniques in September. No other site broke the 100 million mark for the period.

Adobe and Apple both came close, with 95 million and 94 million visitors in September. Lycos made a strong statement with 91 million visitors, easily edging out the various CNET properties that drew 84 million.

ComScore’s other big gainer, YouTube, is a network unto itself, and brought in 81 million unique visitors. If that gets added in to Google’s site numbers, Google would easily best Microsoft’s monthly traffic, not to mention everyone else’s.

Paramount Pictures joins a host of other movie studios looking to bring their content to the Web. Today the mega-studio announced it will make TV shows and movies available on AOL’s new video portal.

Films will cost between $10 and $20 US, and will include classics like Chinatown and newer releases like Mission: Impossible III. Consumers can transfer the movies to as many as three other computer or portable devices using Microsoft’s Windows Media Player.

In August, AOL launched a video player that either offers media free or for a small fee. The company is hoping to be a one-stop show for online video, an aggressive move in light of the popularity of MySpace videos and YouTube (recently bought by Google for $1.65 billion US).

AOL needs to be on the offensive, especially as its rivals create free email services that are shaking up the tech sector. An emerging field like online video could be a treasure chest for AOL. Then again, the AOL-Paramount deal is not the only partnership around.

YouTube has inked deals with Universal, Sony BMG and Warner Bros. in an attempt to flood the online-video king with the kind of material that will bring back repeat customers. And Apple’s iTunes is in cahoots with Disney to bring feature films to online marketplace.

So where does AOL stand? Its position in the online-video industry has yet to be determined, but it faces an uphill battle against stalwarts like Yahoo and MySpace, whose interfaces are incredibly user-friendly. If AOL wants to stand apart from the pack, it has to give customers some incentive, or at the very least a slew of content that can’t be accessed anywhere else.

Mozilla put the second major version of its Firefox web browser into general release Tuesday after a long period of testing, only a week after Microsoft shipped its long-awaited seventh version of Internet Explorer.

While Firefox 2 is not likely to achieve the market dominance of IE 7, the browser does include some significant enhancements that may help it gain market share in its battle against IE, as well as competition with other rivals like Opera and Apple Computer’s Safari browser (see Firefox Killer? IE 7 Unleashed).

Those new features include a new user interface, including glowing toolbar buttons, built-in phishing protection, enhanced search capabilities, and improvements in tabbed browsing and spell checking.

Mozilla developed the browser out of the remnants of Netscape Navigator after AOL offered Netscape as open-source software for a community of developers to improve.

“From our perspective Mozilla is not a traditional software company,” said Christopher Beard, Mozilla’s vice president of products. “It’s all about making the web better for everybody and making sure the web is a shared public resource.”

He said that Mozilla’s community of developers had built on their experience with tabbed browsing and added new capabilities around search, customizability, and usability. Mozilla has added more of the extensions it introduced with Firefox 1.1 and 1.5 and made them more user-friendly.

The new search features let users type in an integrated search box when using Google, Yahoo, or Answers.com. The browser improves security by having access to a list of phishing sites and avoiding them.

Better Tabbing

Mozilla has also improved the tabbed browsing in Firefox 2 by opening links in new tabs instead of new windows and giving each tab a “close tab” button. Users can also scroll among the different open tabs via arrows on the left- and right-hand sides.

A session-restore feature automatically restores a user’s windows, tabs, the text typed-into forms, and any in-progress downloads in case the browser crashes, or if the user is installing an application upgrade or extension.

Users can now preview and subscribe to web feeds, either by subscribing to them via a web service or a stand-alone RSS (really simple syndication) reader, or adding them as live bookmarks.

A built-in spell checker quickly checks the spelling of text entered into web forms without users having to resort to an outside application.

Users can create a bookmark with a “live title” that automatically updates with the latest information.

Firefox also improves on its add-on manager with a better user interface for handling extensions and themes. In addition, the browser now supports JavaScript 1.7 as well as search engine plug-ins written in Sherlock and OpenSearch formats.