I’m somewhat of a browser nerd. I’ve never realised how many web browsers I have installed, and the recent release of Google Chrome only adds to my collection.

Why do I, and quite possibly all computer fans in general, have so many browsers?

On my Mac alone, I have Camino, Firefox, Safari and Shiira. In a virtual machine, I have IE6, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. But why? I only use one.

Many people use the excuse of checking for compatiblity of their websites as justification for their browser collection, but you don’t really need two Gecko-based browsers, two WebKit engines but you probably do need half a million versions of IE.

I think the reason we have so many browsers is that we want to see how our primary browser will evolve.

Browsers generally steal ideas off one another (Firefox ’stole’ tabbed browsing off Opera, but IE ’stole’ it off Firefox) and through installing the largest range of browsers, we can see which innovative features will be integrated into ours. Shiira, for example, has many aesthetic features which I expect will one be adopted by other browsers whilst Chrome’s way of handling web apps will also probably soon be adopted.

The more browsers we see, the more features we can see and we know what our web experience will be like, even if we don’t switch browsers.

Do you, like me, remember when Firefox 1.0 was released?

Our little browser has come a long way since then with RC1 of Firefox 3.0 having just been released.

Firefox today commands about 20% of the web browser usage share so it is no longer exclusively the browser-of-choice of the nerd, but of many ‘normal’ people too. Most websites will now support Firefox when a couple of years ago if you complained over the lack of Firefox support, you would get sniggered at!

So how has Firefox changed since 1.0 which was released nearly 4 years ago on 9 November, 2004?

Firefox 1.5 (29 November, 2005) lacked canvas and SVG support, the latter is now something all proper browsers have. These features are fairly minor additions compared to what was added in 2.0 (24 October, 2006): web feed previewing, search auto-suggest, anti-phishing protection, an improved addon manager and a search plugin manager. Firefox 3 will see an improved history and bookmark manager and much better OS X integration.

The beauty of Firefox, unlike IE, is that they don’t add dozens of pointless features to each new version but instead just make their product seem more polished and finished. I always find that Firefox seems ‘fresh’ due to the relatively frequent, minor twitches which are made to it.

Long live the Fox!