Representatives from Microsoft (Dean Hachamovitch), Opera (Christen Krogh), Mozilla (Mike Shaver) and Google (Sundar Pichal) met at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley tonight for a panel called “Browsers are Hot Again!”, moderated by Businessweek columnist Steve Wildstrom.
The event is timely. There has never been such robust competition in the browser space. Google recently brought Chrome out of beta, and Microsoft’s GM of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch told me earlier today that the Release Candidate of Internet Explorer 8 would be released “sometime this month.”
Notably absent from the panel was Apple, although their Safari browser was brought up repeatedly as an important mobile platform, and Safari’s underlying Webkit javascript engine was also praised as innovative.