How new features appear

Today’s release of Beta 2 of the Safari browser her­alds the intro­duc­tion of tabbed brows­ing in the much talked about browser. This is an inter­est­ing devel­op­ment which shows that some­times, the influ­ence of a par­tic­u­lar browser goes beyond its exist­ing mar­ket share. Safari’s tabbed brows­ing is a result of an imple­men­ta­tion that first appeared in Opera, a browser used pri­mar­ily by devel­op­ers. Mim­ic­k­ing the Opera tabs, the Mozilla project intro­duced a browser which pop­u­lar­ized the fea­ture (the browser is Mozilla, and also serves as the core engine for the Netscape browser). When Safari was intro­duced, there was an out­cry from the devel­op­ers’ com­mu­nity over the browser’s lack of tabs. With this release, Apple shows that it is lis­ten­ing closely.

All these devel­op­ments are hap­pen­ing among browsers which have a com­bined mar­ket share equiv­a­lent to one fourth to one fifth of the one engine enjoyed by IE, the leader (in browser mar­ket share) offered by Microsoft. How­ever, they point to an inter­est­ing sce­nario about how new fea­tures go from being enjoyed by a small but vocal minor­ity to a wider audi­ence. Tabbed brows­ing was one of the big inno­va­tions that Opera intro­duced in the mar­ket­place but it wasn’t until Mozilla’s imple­men­ta­tion that it started get­ting noticed. Once devel­op­ers got used to it, they real­ized that it was dif­fi­cult to use browsers that did not offer it and “demanded” that the fea­ture be avail­able in any new browser.

This is an area where an open source project like Mozilla can be con­sid­ered to have con­tributed to the main­stream. While Mozilla’s mar­ket share remains tiny in com­par­i­son to that of Inter­net Explorer, its impact on web browser devel­op­ment is grow­ing. On one side, it is help­ing improve the way web pages are devel­oped (due to its strong sup­port for web stan­dards), and on the other, the joint effort of thou­sands of peo­ple are help­ing develop fea­tures that match or improve on what is offered by other browsers.

Since the pop­u­lar­ity spurt of tabbed brows­ing, there hasn’t been any major devel­op­ment com­ing from the Microsoft end (most of the focus has been in fix­ing a num­ber of annoy­ing secu­rity bugs in their browser) but I would expect the fea­ture to show up in future ver­sions, as IE is now the only browser not to sport the feature.