The core battle will likely be between Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10. S40 is a feature phone OS, which will presumably stick around a while longer on the low end, but is not part of the app-centric smartphone battle. The latter is a legacy platform that will only drop in popularity as users upgrade their phones. Who are the likely contestants in this battle? Currently Nokia’s two operating systems S40 and Symbian are the only two platforms under iOS and Android that are around the 10–15% mark. Manoeuvring into third place by the end of 2013 will likely be a key springboard to building out the victor’s ecosystem however. I suspect these platforms will need to at least get into the double digit market share, or have something else to offer developers to remain in the race. A weak 3rd place won’t be good enough to get developer attention. For some contestants their entire futures as an independent entity rest on not only wrestling 3rd place out of the hands of their rivals, but building on that platform to get closer to iOS and Android than the rest of the chasing pack. The more interesting battle in my mind in 2013 is the looming battle for 3rd place, and thus relevancy, in the smartphone market. The main contest between those two will be who comes out on top in the premium markets, where there is more profit–rather than marketshare–on the line. iOS and Android will go at it tooth and nail through 2013, but the latter already has the marketshare battle sewn up globally, as it extends its reach downwards into the more price sensitive markets that Apple chooses not to compete in. Prediction: IE11 and Chrome 1,234 (~approx.) going toe to toe by the end of 2013? Mobile platform wars: the race for thirdįorget about the titanic battle for first place in the mobile market. Is it in danger of dropping out the top 5 browsers? I’m not sure if Opera is actually losing users, or whether the market is just growing faster than it is. In the early days of January it is down further to 1.16%. In the last year, Opera dropped from 1.98% to only 1.26%. One prediction that I hope doesn’t come true is the demise of Opera in the desktop market. I strongly believe that engine diversity is good for the Web, so I’ll be hoping for a IE and Firefox comeback in 2013. Microsoft could really put a cat amongst the pigeons, and break any potential WebKit dominance on the desktop. Competition breeds innovation, but with Apple and Google using the same engine, not much competition has been happening between those great rivals. If they can reduce that to around a year or less, and keep their current pace of development, could we have a mighty war on our hands between IE and Chrome for marketshare and standards compliance supremacy before the end of the year? It would certainly make things more interesting. The gap between IE releases have been getting shorter since IE8 came out. It has a WebGL sized hole in its standard support (but how many average web pages use 3D graphics?) and doesn’t support some of the more experimental APIs, but the gap that grew from IE putting its tools down for 5 years has almost closed. It’s CSS, HTML and ECMAScript support is finally competitive with the competition. Can they do it? It’s hard to say, but it’s clear that IE10 is Microsoft’s best browser in quite some time. ![]() As IE10 comes out on Windows 7, and Windows 8 starts to build marketshare, Microsoft will hope it reverse their losses to Chrome. Towards the end of the year, Microsoft released Windows 8 with IE10. However its ~2% marketshare gain was mostly due to Safari on iPad’s growth rather than the desktop browser. Indeed, the only browser to grow except for Chrome was the other WebKit browser, Safari. Lets get our crystal ball out and look what we could have in store for us in 2013, in terms of the browser and platform wars.Ĭhrome spent much of 2012 eating marketshare from IE and Firefox.
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