经济学人下载:浏览器之战

Browser wars

浏览器之战

Chrome rules the web 

谷歌浏览器掌控网络

What Google’s browser has in common with Queen Victoria

谷歌浏览器跟维多利亚女王的共同点是什么？

Aug 10th 2013 |From the print edition

EMPIRES rise and fall swiftly on the internet. Google’s Chrome browser, which celebrates its fifth birthday next month, has captured much of the territory of older browsers and is now responsible for about 43% of all the web traffic generated by the world’s desktop computers. When Chrome was launched the dominant browser was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), with a 68% share—it is now down to just 25%.

网络帝国兴败迅速。谷歌的Chrome浏览器下个月就要庆祝诞生15周年了。它攻城拔寨，抢夺了旧浏览器不少的份额，现在拥有台式机领域网站流量的43%之多。谷歌浏览器发布的时候，占据主导地位的浏览器是微软的IE浏览器，当时台式机市场占有率为68%，现在已经降到了25%。

It is only 20 years since Mosaic, the first browser capable of combining words and images in a single page, was made available. Some of its developers went on to launch Netscape, an improved version, in 1994, just as the internet was taking off. But Netscape’s dominance quickly crumbled after Microsoft started bundling IE with its Windows operating system. IE and Microsoft’s other software became so prevalent that in 2000 an American court briefly contemplated breaking the company into two.

从第一款能同时显示文本和图像的Mosaic浏览器诞生到现在也不过20年的时间。当年Mosaic的许多开发者继续在1994年开发了改进版的网景浏览器。当时互联网刚要大规模发展。但是网景的主导地位很快被微软取代，因为微软将IE浏览器与其系统绑定销售。微软包括IE在内的很多软件风行一时，以至于2000年的时候，一家美国法院曾经考虑将微软公司一分为二。

By 2010, when the European Commission forced Microsoft to start offering Windows users a choice of browsers, many were switching anyway, especially to Mozilla’s Firefox. Now Chrome is increasingly pushing Firefox to the margins. Measuring browser use is difficult and subjective: one source shows that IE is still in front in terms of numbers of visitors to websites. But for e-commerce, share of traffic matters more. By this measure Chrome now dominates much of the planet. Like the boast made of the British empire in Queen Victoria’s time, the sun never sets on its dominions.

2010年，欧盟执行委员会强制命令微软为Windows使用者提供浏览器选项，很多用户选择了Mozilla公司的火狐浏览器。现在Chrome浏览器的崛起将火狐推到了边缘。衡量一款浏览器的使用情况既困难又主观。一个来源显示按照访问者访问网站的数量算，IE仍然领先。但是对电子商务来说，信息流量份额才是最重要的。按照流量算的话，谷歌浏览器主导了全球的浏览器市场。就像维多利亚时期大英帝国引以为豪的景象：大英帝国的领土上太阳从不落山。