Browser Wars 3.0:

Coming to a screen near you! Yes, that's right. It might be starting up again. IE's share of the browser market—is there such a thing since browsers are free?—has dropped below 80 percent with most of that share going to Firefox, a direct descendant of, you guessed it, Netscape Navigator.

Blake Ross, a teenager who worked as an intern at Netscape, developed Firefox along with a Mozilla developer named Dave Hyatt. The idea would be to develop a browser that would be slim and fast. Obviously, the succeeded.

Now for the fun part. Back in the early days of browser wars, the thing that pushed Microsoft into developing its own browser was the realization that Netscape was moving toward developing a web browser that would take the place of the computer's operating system. The user would be able to run programs right within the browser itself.

Sounds farfetched to us non techy types, but it scared the be-jeezies out of Microsoft. Well, take a guess at whose working on that very same scheme as we speak. Blake Ross. He's now employed at a company called Parakey, which is working on creating a Web-based operating system. You can read about it at EWeek. This should be fun to watch.