SAN FRANCISCO — SAN FRANCISCO - The browser, that porthole onto the broad horizon of the Web, is about to get some fancy new window dressing.
Next month, after three years of development and six months of public testing, Mozilla, the insurgent browser developer that rose from the ashes of Netscape, will release Firefox 3.0. It will feature a few tricks that could change the way people organize and find the sites they visit most frequently.
Not to be outdone, Microsoft Corp. recently took the wraps off the first public test version of the latest edition of Internet Explorer, which is used by about 75 percent of computer owners, according to Net Applications, a market share tracking firm.
The finished version of Internet Explorer 8 could be released by the end of the year and is expected to have additional features.
Even Apple Inc., which once politely kept its Safari browser within the confines of its own devices, is making a somewhat controversial push to get it onto the computers of people who use Windows PCs.
In other words, the browser war - the skirmish that landed Microsoft in antitrust trouble in the 1990s - is heating up again.
"The typical browser for today's consumer doesn't look all that different than it did 10 years ago," said Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, one of the firms that invested in Flock, a browser startup.
"That is an unsustainable trend that is the launching point for the second browser war," Cheng said, "which will not be won by monopolistic muscle but by innovation."
America Online, now AOL, which acquired Netscape, spun off the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation in 2003. Its Firefox browser soon inspired an open-source movement backed by computer enthusiasts. Early versions of Firefox introduced features like a built-in pop-up blocker to kill ads, and tabbed browsing, which lets users toggle between Web windows.
Firefox now has 170 million users around the world and an 18 percent share of the browser market, according to Net Applications. That is especially impressive given that most of its users have made the active choice to download the software, while Internet Explorer is installed on most PCs at the factory.
With tasks like e-mail and word processing now migrating from the PC to the Internet, analysts and industry players think the browser will soon become even more valuable and strategically important.
