The outbreak of peace between technology giants is nothing if not temporary

IT’S QUIET. Too quiet. The last month has seen the launch of major updates of three of the world’s most commonly used programs. Last week, the non-profit Mozilla organisation launched Firefox 4; Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9; Google launched Chrome 11.

They’re all web browsers. Fifteen years ago, that market was the bloodiest field of geek endeavour. That is, if you could call it a market – all of the above products, despite being installed on millions of machines, have been given away for free for all of their existence.

Free they may have been, but billions rode on the battles between them. The fight for market dominance between Netscape, the ancestral forefather of Mozilla, and Microsoft’s Explorer determined the future of the internet – and the lack of a future for Netscape.

These days, the launch of a new version of Explorer is barely given a footnote in the technical press. When Mozilla launched Firefox, the only people who seemed to take much note were their old enemies at Microsoft, who sent them a cake.

Why doesn’t anyone care? It’s not that there hasn’t been much change recently. In fact, we’re in something of a golden age for web browsers.

The genial competition between Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla (not to mention the contributions of their smaller cousins, Opera and Apple’s Safari) have led to web surfing that is faster, stabler, and more polished. The latest versions have been a race to the top by everyone concerned, with each manufacturer racing neck and neck on speed and memory usage benchmarks.

Part of the reason is that if you’re an end-user, you may simply not have noticed the version change. Microsoft generally rolls out its new browsers to everyone who uses a compatible Microsoft operating system (that’s one of the reasons why it won the war with Netscape). Google’s Chrome pioneered the “silent upgrade”, tweaking and compressing updates to its browser so that the end-user barely notices the change (and would struggle to avoid it).

Firefox 4 has more of a struggle, but has already persuaded over 40 million downloaders to at least attempt a switch from Firefox 3. Every upgrade after this one will be automatic, too.

Another reason is that these browsers, for all their hyper-competition, are almost interchangeable – for web developers and websites especially. It used to be the case that your browser determined what features coders could provide for you on the web, and even what websites would work properly. These days, the major browser companies have settled on some established standards, and long-suffering coders have built external programs that can paper over any remaining cracks. A website that doesn’t work on all of these modern browsers is a profoundly broken piece of work.

If I was going to make a clumsy geopolitical analogy, and as a columnist I can barely resist the temptation, I’d say that what we have here is a period of post-war prosperity. All of these companies have realised the futility of fighting their battles on their users’ desktops, and have combined to stabilise the web experience so that they can have a platform they can all use.

To continue the analogy, though, that doesn’t mean the war is over. On the contrary, it’s simply been displaced into other fields. Web wars are so bloody, and so profitless, that everyone, from Apple to Microsoft to Google, has declared the real fight to be elsewhere.

It might be mobile hardware, or it might be non-web “app stores”. It could be tablets, or it could be game consoles. All these platforms have the rudiments of a web browser baked in somewhere. But none competes on the features of those browsers. They are there as a base description of what people expect from anything with a net connection these days.

That doesn’t mean browsers are not important. A smartphone or an iPad would be a profoundly unappetising product if it didn’t let you access the web, which it does so via browser code. But at this point, it is all just plumbing – a basic facility, like having a keyboard or displaying colour graphics.

Many think this period of stability and incremental improvement will lead to a revitalisation of the web. The browser updates essentially provide most of the web-viewing public, whether they know it or not, with features that web coders are only slowly beginning to exploit.

Buried in these new browsers (and their planned, unavoidable updates) are capabilities that provide programmers with the ability to use smooth animations, 3D graphics, video and sophisticated data storage and access.

But even with peace broken out, all the attention is elsewhere. Closed systems such as the iPhone are attracting all the excitement.

Even online, attention is being mostly paid to spaces such as Facebook, where control of the platform limits the amount of HTML innovation within that platform.

The quiet maturity of the web platform is read as marking its slow decline.

Browsers were never seen as a real market, because the product had no price. The competition was cut-throat. However, on that work was built an entire information infrastructure. Now that battlefield has stabilised, no one seems to notice quite how secure a foundation it is for a million other markets.

There may be some real money for those who do.