Browser wars
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A browser war is a competition for dominance in the usage share of web browsers. The "first browser war," (1995–2001) consisted of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.[2] Browser wars continued with the decline of Internet Explorer's market share and the popularity of other browsers, including Firefox, Google Chrome (and other Chromium-based browsers), Safari, Microsoft Edge and Opera.
With the introduction of
Background
Other browsers had started to surface by the end of 1992, many of which were based on the
Mosaic wars
In 1993, more browsers became available, including Cello, Lynx, tkWWW, and Mosaic. The most influential of these was Mosaic, a multi-platform browser developed at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). By October 1994, Mosaic was "well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface", according to Gary Wolfe of Wired.[6]
Several companies licensed Mosaic to create their commercial browsers, such as
There are two ages of the Internet—before Mosaic, and after. The combination of Tim Berners-Lee's Web protocols, which provided connectivity, and Marc Andreesen's browser, which provided a great interface, proved explosive. In twenty-four months, the Web has gone from being unknown to absolutely ubiquitous.[7]
— Mark Pesce, ZDNet
To resolve legal issues with NCSA, the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation, and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser improved Mosaic's usability and reliability and was able to display pages as they loaded. By 1995, helped by the fact that it was free for non-commercial use, the browser dominated the emerging World Wide Web.
Other browsers launched during 1994 included
While Netscape faced new competition from OmniWeb, Eolas WebRouser, UdiWWW, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.0, it continued to dominate the market for 1995.
First browser war (1995–2001)
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By mid-1995, the World Wide Web had received a great deal of attention in popular culture and the mass media. Netscape Navigator was the most widely used web browser and Microsoft had licensed Mosaic to create Internet Explorer 1.0,[9][10] which it had released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus! pack in August.[11]
Unlike Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer 1.0 was available to all Windows users free of charge, including commercial companies.
New versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape (branded as Netscape Communicator) were released often over the following few years. New features were routinely added, including Netscape's JavaScript (subsequently replicated by Microsoft as JScript) and proprietary HTML tags such as <blink>
(Navigator) and <marquee>
(Internet Explorer).[14]
Internet Explorer 3.0 offered nearly identical services as its competitor Netscape, As 3.0 offered scripting support and the market's first commercial
In October 1997,
During these releases, it was common for web designers to display "best viewed in Netscape" or "best viewed in Internet Explorer" logos. These images often identified a specific browser and commonly linked to a source from which the stated browser could be downloaded. These logos generally recognized the divergence between the standards supported by the browsers and signified which browser was used for testing the pages. In response, supporters of the principle that websites should be compliant with World Wide Web Consortium standards and hence viewable with any browser started the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign, which employed its logo similar to the partisan ones. Most mainstream websites, however, specified one of Netscape or IE as their preferred browser while making some attempt to support minimal functionality on the other.
While Netscape began with about 80% market share and a good deal of public goodwill, as a relatively small company deriving the great bulk of its income from what was essentially a single product (Navigator and its derivatives), it was financially vulnerable. Microsoft's resources allowed them to make Internet Explorer available without charge, as the revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and marketing. As a result, Internet Explorer was provided free for all Windows and Macintosh users, unlike Netscape which was free for home and educational use but would require a paid license for business use.[16]
Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with every copy of Windows, which had an over 90% share of the desktop operating system market, allowing the company to obtain market share more easily than Netscape, as customers already had Internet Explorer installed as the default browser. At this time, many new computer purchasers had never extensively used a web browser before. Consequently, the buyer did not have anything else to compare with and little motivation to consider alternatives; any difference in browser features or ergonomics paled in comparison with the set of abilities they had gained with access to the Internet and the World Wide Web.
During the
Second browser war (2004–2017)
Decline of Netscape
At the start of Netscape Navigator's decline, Netscape open-sourced its browser code and later entrusted it to the newly formed non-profit
In response, in April 2004, the Mozilla Foundation and
The growing number of device/browser combinations in use, legally-mandated web accessibility, as well as the expansion of expected web functionality to essentially require DOM and scripting abilities, including AJAX, made web standards of increasing importance during this era. Instead of advertising their proprietary extensions, browser developers began to market their software based on how closely it adhered to standards.[20]
On December 28, 2007, Netscape announced that support for its Mozilla-derived Netscape Navigator would be discontinued on February 1, 2008, suggesting its users migrate to Mozilla Firefox.[21] However, on January 28, 2008, Netscape announced that support would be extended to March 1, 2008, and mentioned Flock alongside Firefox as alternatives to its users.
Internet Explorer
In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 would be the last standalone version of its browser. Future enhancements would be dependent on Windows Vista, which would include new tools such as the WPF and XAML to enable developers to build web applications.
On February 15, 2005, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 7 would be available for Windows XP SP2 and later versions of Windows by mid-2005.[22] The announcement introduced the new version of the browser as a major upgrade over Internet Explorer 6 SP1.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 on October 18, 2006. It included tabbed browsing, a search bar, a
In October 2010, StatCounter reported that Internet Explorer had for the first time dropped below 50% market share to 49.87% in their figures.[27] Also, StatCounter reported Internet Explorer 8's first drop in usage share in the same month.[28]
Microsoft released
Starting in 2015 with the release of Windows 10, Microsoft shifted from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge. However, the new browser had failed to capture much popularity by 2018.[29] Microsoft Edge switched from its own browser engine, EdgeHTML, to Chromium's Blink engine in 2020 for all platforms except for iOS, where it kept relying on WebKit due to platform restrictions.[30][31]
Competing desktop and mobile browsers
Opera had been a long-time player in the browser wars, known for being lightweight and introducing innovative features such as tabbed browsing and mouse gestures; However, the software was commercial, which hampered its adoption compared to its free rivals until 2005, when the browser became
On October 24, 2006, Mozilla released Mozilla Firefox 2.0. It included the ability to reopen recently closed tabs, a session restore feature to resume work where it had been left after a crash, a phishing filter, and a spell-checker for text fields. Mozilla released
Google Chrome's entry
Google released the Chrome browser on September 1, 2008,[39] using the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and a faster JavaScript engine called V8. Shortly after, an open-sourced version for the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms was released under the name Chromium. According to Net Applications, Chrome had gained a 3.6% usage share by October 2009. After the release of the beta for Mac OS X and Linux, the market share had increased rapidly.[40]
During December 2009 and January 2010, StatCounter reported that its statistics indicated that Firefox 3.5 was the most popular browser when counting individual browser versions, passing Internet Explorer 7 and 8 by a small margin.[41][42] This was the first time a browser surpassed the Internet Explorer since the fall of Netscape Navigator. However, this feat, which GeekSmack called the "dethroning of Microsoft and its Internet Explorer 7 browser,"[43] could largely be attributed to the fact that it came at a time when version 8 was replacing version 7 as the dominant Internet Explorer version; no more than two months later Internet Explorer 8 had established itself as the most popular browser again. Other major statistics, such as Net Applications, never reported any other browser having a higher usage share than Internet Explorer if each version of each browser was looked at individually: for example, Firefox 3.5 was reported as the third most popular browser version from December 2009 to February 2010, succeeded by Firefox 3.6 since April 2010, each ahead of Internet Explorer 7 but behind Internet Explorer 6 and 8.[44]
Google Chrome's dominance and evolving web standards
On January 21, 2010, Mozilla released
Google released Google Chrome 9 on February 3, 2011. New features introduced included support for
The concept of rapid releases established by Google Chrome prompted Mozilla to do the same for its Firefox browser. On June 21, 2011, Firefox 5.0 was the first rapid release for this browser, finished a mere six weeks after the previous edition.
During this era, all major web browsers implemented support for
By 2017 usage shares of Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer fell well below 5% each, while Google Chrome had expanded to over 60% worldwide. On May 25, 2017, Andreas Gal, former Mozilla CTO, publicly announced that Google Chrome won the Second Browser War.[60]
Aftermath
Due to Google Chrome's success, in December 2018, Microsoft announced that they would be building a new version of Edge based on Chromium and powered by Google's rendering engine, Blink, rather than their own rendering engine, EdgeHTML.[61][62] The new Microsoft Edge browser was released on January 15, 2020.[63] Though Firefox showed a slight increase in usage share as of February 2019, it continues to struggle with less than 10% usage share worldwide.[64] By April 2019, worldwide Google Chrome usage share crossed 70% across personal computers and remained over 60% combining all devices.[65] In June 2022, Microsoft permanently retired Internet Explorer in favor of Microsoft Edge as their sole browser.[66][67] As of January 2023, the new Microsoft Edge based on Blink was the 2nd most used web browser on desktop having 11.09% as market share. Meanwhile, considering all platforms, Microsoft Edge was the 3rd most used web browser having 4.46% as market share.[citation needed] In 2023, Internet Explorer was permanently disabled by Microsoft on many versions of Windows 10.[68]
As of 2023, Microsoft Edge has been noted to promote itself when visiting or searching for Google Chrome. Links from Windows integrated features, such as widgets, are opened in Edge regardless of users preferences for alternate browsers.[69]
See also
- After the Software Wars
- Comparison of web browsers
- History of the web browser
- History of the World Wide Web
- List of web browsers
- Usage share of web browsers
References
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- ZDNet.
Over the past decade, a lot has changed: Mobile devices now outnumber traditional PCs, and the desktop browser has become much less important than mobile web clients and apps. Apple's mobile Safari and Google's Chrome are now major players, Mozilla is in a time of major transition, and Microsoft is still paying for its past sins with Internet Explorer.
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Bibliography
- DOJ/Antitrust: U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division. Civil Action No. 98-1232 (Antitrust) Complaint, United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation. May 18, 1998. Press release: Justice Department Files Antitrust Suit Against Microsoft for Unlawfully Monopolizing Computer Software Markets
External links
- A March 1998 Interview with Marc Andreessen about Microsoft antitrust litigation and browser wars
- The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History: Chapter 4. Birth of the World Wide Web by Gregory R. Gromov
- Browser Statistics – Month by month comparison spanning from 2002 and onward displaying the usage share of browsers among web developers
- Browser Stats – Chuck Upsdell's Browser Statistics
- Browser Stats – Net Applications' Browser Statistics
- StatCounter Global Stats – tracks the market share of browsers including mobile from over 4 billion monthly page views
- Browser war, RIA and future of web development
- Browser Wars II: The Saga Continues – an article about the development of the browser wars
- Web Browsers' War – 2012 – An article about web browsers' war in 2012
- Thomas Haigh, "Protocols for Profit: Web and Email Technologies as Product and Infrastructure" in The Internet & American Business, eds. Ceruzzi & Aspray, MIT Press, 2008– business & technological history of web browsers, online preprint
- Browser Market Share Archived 2017-03-15 at the Wayback Machine – current market share of browsers and their versions, desktop and mobile