Apple Heats Up The Browser Wars

The battle to build the best Web browser is now a five-way fight.Just when you thought the browser wars couldn't get any weirder, here comes Steve Jobs rumbling onto the scene like the Stay Puft Marshmallow man tromping over buildings in downtown Manhattan. If last year's release of Safari for Windows seemed like an experiment, Apple's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) release Tuesday of a beta version of Safari 4 for Mac and Windows makes it clear this is going to be the messiest fight since Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray battled Zuul and Gozer the Gozerian in the movie Ghost Busters. Currently, Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Internet Explorer owns 67.6% of the browser market, followed by Mozilla's Firefox with 21.5%, Apple's Safari with 8.3%, Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) Chrome with 1.1% and Opera with 0.7%, according to NetApplications. more