Little on the Internet seems worth fighting for. For many, not even the cost of Internet access any more. Lately, though, web browsers have materialised in numbers to satisfy a growing urge for fresh wheels to roam the Internet. Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, with a 80 per cent market share in the US, and even more elsewhere. But Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Safari and of course, a new Chinese browser called Maxtor, are grabbing attention. Google.com is being prodded into developing a web browser too, though the company has resisted so far, saying the browser market is too full (Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in May that the industry is ‘‘browser obsessed’’). But the trend is really towards offering software plug-ins and downloads through browsers as people do a lot more with computers and the Internet than just browse. Maps, e-mail, chat, internet telephony, P2P, streaming are just a few that could ring in the second round of the war of the browsers.

Another low for H-1B

One hundred companies wanting to hire software programmers ‘‘from India’’ are facing a backlash in the US because of their advertising. An IT industry association, the Programmers Guild, has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to stop this ‘‘abuse’’ of the H-1B programme. The complaints have been filed since May and some 280 more complaints are said to be in the works this year. The Guild’s ire is being directed at job advertisements that say things like ‘‘We require candidates for H1B from India,’’ and ‘‘We sponsor GC [green card] and we do prefer H1B holders.’’ This is a violation of US law since the country’s Immigration and Nationality Act requires that US jobs must be available to US workers, the Guild has said in its complaints. Some 60,000 Indians can go to the US under the H-1B programme every year. For the last two years, this ‘quota’ has been filled up within a month after it it opened.

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