When Internet legend Marc Andreesen speaks, the world listens. He spoke last week, proclaiming  that the problem with browsers is that they haven't kept pace with the  web. Specifically, he explained that the "web has become so central to what we do" and work environments requiring unfettered collaboration, and yet current browsers have not taken advantage of this shift.

A little history may be useful to understand why this made the tech news roundups. Andreesen founded Netscape and its browser gained more than 90% of the market in the 1990s. Then came along Internet Explorer from Microsoft and the rest is anti-trust history, so to speak. Netscape now has less than 1% of the market, with IE still owning about 65%. There are other known players, Apple's Safari, Firefox (ancestor to Netscape), and Google's Chrome, and you get the idea that this is a big stakes game.

Andreesen is now throwing his considerable influence behind a startup Rockmelt, that is in stealth mode as to its intentions. Because he sits on Facebook's board of directors, the big rumor is that Rockmelt is building a FB-browser to reach its 250 million users. This may be an interesting entry point for Rockmelt to gain traction in a very tough browser market.

While the tech literati tries to read the tea leaves, I'll bet the farm that the new browser wars will not affect the enterprise market. After all, no one buys a browser separately anymore, no less corporate IT. Can you imagine business users putting up with ads embedded in the browser?

Instead, business users are always looking for better, easier and more powerful ways to do their work. The place where this is all trending to is the desktop. We're already see this with the proliferation of desktop applications like Yammer and, of course, email clients like Outlook.

This makes sense because no one really wants to browse to a website to get work done; it's only because they have to. Currently, the browser is great at rendering HTML files but what about audio, video, or files created in Excel or Word? The browser treats non-HTML files as second class citizens. If the browser does not support the file, then it cannot be displayed and must be downloaded or saved to disk. If you’ve ever wondered why you are always browsing to a website and downloading a file, this is why.

Andreesen is right: the problem with browsers is that they haven't kept pace with how business users want to work. Just don't tell the 250 million Facebook users; his browser still in stealth mode.