WEB BROWSER WARS... AGAIN?

News.com had a good grouping of articles on the increasing browser wars and Microsoft's lack of attention in developing IE.

Another article below has Marc Andreessen discussing this topic:

This time, it's not Andreessen's former company, Netscape Communications, that's taking on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It's the increasingly popular smaller products such as Apple Computer's Safari and the open-source Firefox, Andreessen said.

"It may turn out that there's a one-two punch with Firefox and Safari," Andreessen said Wednesday at the Web 2.0 conference here. "Microsoft is certainly going to respond competitively."

Firefox owes more than a debt of gratitude to Netscape. The company created and funded the open-source Mozilla project that created it, although Mozilla was later spun off as an independent group.

Claiming browser development has been at a standstill since 1998, Andreessen said the recent emergence of competitive software will force Microsoft to pay more attention to developing new features in IE. (full article)