I came across stories of the browser wars in my programming history research — here’s a brief overview. It all started in the 1990s with the start of Web 1.0… 💾
Mosaic War
- The WorldWideWeb was created in the 1980s/1990s and was renamed Nexus for the NeXTstep platform in 1991.
- Many browsers started to appear in 1992–1993, such as Cello, Lynx, and Mosaic → Mosaic, a web browser developed at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) was the most notable out of these browsers.
Other browsers that were released at this time were licensed browsers using Mosaic (AirMosaic, Quarterdeck Mosaic, Spyglass Mosaic), and other Unix browsers (tkWWW, Line Mode Browser, ViolaWWW, Erwise, MidasWWW, and MacWWW).
- In 1994–1995, other notable browsers emerged from large companies: IBM’s Web Explorer, Microsoft’sInternet Explorer 1.0 (built through a Mosaic license).
Other browsers that were released at this time were Navipress, SlipKnot, MacWeb, Browse, UdiWWW, WebRouser, and OmniWeb.
Companies licensed Mosaic to create commercial browsers — one of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreesen, created a new browser called “Mosaic Netscape” → this browser was later renamed Netscape Navigator to resolve legal issues with NCSA.
Netscape was free for non-commercial use, and it became the dominant browser on the World Wide Web by 1995.
1st Browser War → (1995–2001)
Key Players: Netscape: Netscape Navigator (L), Microsoft: Internet Explorer (W)
Background
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 2.0 was released to all Windows users to use for free (including for commercial usage).
The release of Internet Explorer 4.0 && the green dinosaur
IE 4.0 was released in October 1997, and there was a huge “e” logo at the release party — this logo was dropped off at Netscape’s front lawn with the sign “From the IE team… We Love You.”
The Netscape team wrote “Netscape(72), Microsoft (18)” on a sign and taped it on a dinosaur, and placed Netscape’s mascot dinosaur on the “e” logo.
Market share at that time: Netscape(72%), Microsoft (18%)
However, this difference in market share did not continue for a long time…
IE was free of charge for all Windows and Mac users (unlike Netscape, which was only free for non-commercial use). IE also came pre-installed with Windows computers (was held the most market share in desktop operating systems)— this helped IE gain browser market share.
Then… in 1995, Netscape was acquired by AOL for $4.2 Billion. By 2001, Internet Explorer had over 96% of the browser market share.
2nd Browser War → (2004–2017)
Key Players: AOL (prev. Netscape): Mozilla Firefox (L), Microsoft: Internet Explorer (L), Opera Software: Opera (L), Apple: Safari (L) Google: Chrome (W)
Netscape open-sourced its browser code to be maintained by Mozilla Foundation → later stripped to a browser-only version and eventually changed its browser name to “Firefox” in 2004. In 2006, Opera released Opera 9, which was the first Windows browser to pass the Acid2 test. In the same year, Microsoft released IE 7, and IE 8 in 2008 → this scored 20/100 in the Acid3 test. In 2003, Apple released Safari for macOS (and the beta of a Windows version in 2007 and discontinued in 2012).
The Acid(2,3, etc.) test is a web testing page from the Web Standards Project that checks to see if a browser is compliant with the DOM, JavaScript, and other web standards.
Google’s Chrome was released in 2008 — it uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and a faster Javascript engine (V8). The open-sourced version for the Windows, Mac OS, and Linux was released under the name Chromium.
In 2010, Firefox and IE were tied for the most popular browsers. However, things started to change in 2011 with Google’s Google Chrome 9. Google released several versions in the same year and reached Google Chrome v. 17 by February 2012. In the years to follow, these companies released various versions of their browsers to follow Google Chrome’s rapid version releases. By 2017, Google Chrome expanded to over ~60% of the browser market share globally.
Microsoft announced that IE will start to be discontinued in 2021 and officially off desktops in 2022 — it is getting replaced with Microsoft Edge. Microsoft is building a new version of Microsoft Edge based on Chromium and Google’s rendering engine (Blink).
What’s next?
Stay tuned for my next post about Web3…
