LET'S LOOK AT BROWSER WARS

Browser War 1.  Microsoft vs Netscape Navigator

By mid-1995, the World Wide Web gradually began receiving a great deal of attention in the popular culture and mass media. Netscape Navigator was the dominant and most widely used web browser at that time, while Microsoft had just licensed Mosaic as the basis of Internet Explorer 1.0 which it released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus! Pack in August 1995.[1]

Internet Explorer 2.0 was released by Microsoft as a free download three months later. Compared to Netscape Navigator, the software was available for all Windows users for free, including commercial companies.

New versions of Netscape Navigator (later bundled with applications and branded Netscape Communicator) and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years.

Development was rapid and new features were added to one-up their competitors - notably, this included the emergence of the similar-but-incompatible JavaScript implementations (the one in IE being called JScript), as well as proprietary HTML tags such as the notorious Blink and Marquee elements. The introduction of new features often took priority over bug fixes, and therefore the browser wars were a time of unstable browsers, shaky Web-standards compliance, frequent crashes, and many security holes.

Internet Explorer 4 changed the tides of the browser wars. It integrated itself into the operating system, a move broadly criticized, especially by IT professionals and industry critics, variously for being technologically disadvantageous and an apparent exploitation of Microsoft's monopoly on the PC platform with Windows OS, in order to push users to become IE users simply because IE was "already there" on their PCs.

During these times 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 version and were commonly linked to a source from which the "preferred" browser could be downloaded. To some extent, these logos were indicative of the divergence between the "standards" supported by the browsers and signified which browser was used for testing the pages. In reaction, supporters of the principle that web sites should be compliant with Internet (W3C) standards and interoperable with any browser started the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign, which employed its own logo similar in form to the partisan ones.Internet Explorer 5 & 6 dominance

Microsoft had three strong advantages in the browser wars.

One was resources: Netscape began with about 80% market share and a good deal of public goodwill, but 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. Netscape's total revenue never exceeded the interest income generated by Microsoft's cash on hand. Microsoft's vast resources allowed IE to remain free as the enormous revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and marketing, resulting in rapid improvements. Netscape was commercial software for businesses but provided for free for home and education users; Internet Explorer was provided as free for Windows users, cutting off a significant revenue stream.

Another advantage was that Microsoft Windows had over 90% share of the operating system market. IE was bundled with every copy of Windows; therefore Microsoft was able to dominate the market share easily as customers had IE as a default. In this time period, many new computer purchases were first computer purchases for home users or offices, and many of the users had never extensively used a web browser before, so had nothing to compare with and little motivation to consider alternatives; the great set of features they had gained in gaining access to the Internet and the World Wide Web at all made any modest differences in browser features or ergonomics pale in comparison.

Thirdly it was faster and it adopted the W3C's published specifications more faithfully than Netscape Navigator 4.0. Unlike Netscape, it provided the possibility for truly "dynamic" pages in which the flow of the text and images of the page could be altered after the page was loaded.

Other Microsoft actions also hurt Netscape: Microsoft created a licensing agreement with AOL to base AOL's primary interface on IE rather than Netscape. Microsoft purchased and released a web authoring tool as a competitor to Netscape's Composer, FrontPage, making it easy to utilize proprietary extensions and non-standard HTML code in web pages. Microsoft included support for the fledgeling CSS in IE. Some web designers found it easier to write their pages for IE only than to support Netscape's proprietary LAYER extensions. Microsoft also locked up a large portion of the Macintosh browser market in 1997 as part of its agreement with Apple that year to make Internet Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Mac for five years.

The effect of these actions was to "cut off Netscape's air supply". These actions eventually led to the United States Microsoft antitrust case in 1998 which found that Microsoft had abused its monopoly on operating systems to unfairly dominate the market and eliminating competition. This, together with several bad business decisions on Netscape's part, led to Netscape's defeat by the end of 1998, after which the company was acquired by America Online for USD $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer became the new dominant browser, attaining a peak of about 96% of the web browser usage share during 2002, more than Netscape had at its peak.

The first browser war ended with Internet Explorer having no remaining serious competition for its market share. This also brought an end to the rapid innovation in web browsers; until 2006 there was only one new version of Internet Explorer since version 6.0 had been released in 2001. Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1 was developed as part of Windows XP SP1, and integrated into Windows Server 2003. Further enhancements were made to Internet Explorer in Windows XP SP2 (released in 2004), including a pop-up blocker and stronger default security settings against the installation of ActiveX controls.



Browser War 2  After the defeat of Netscape by Internet Explorer, Netscape open-sourced their browser code, which led to the formation of the Mozilla Foundation—a primarily community-driven project to create a successor to Netscape. Development continued for several years with little widespread adoption until a stripped-down browser-only version of the full suite was created, featuring new ideas such as tabbed browsing and a separate search bar. The browser-only version was initially named Phoenix, but because of trademark issues that name was changed, first to Firebird, then to Firefox. This browser became the focus of the Mozilla Foundation's development efforts and Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released on 9 November 2004. Since then it has continued to gain an increasing share of the browser market.



Browser War 3.  Will Chrome Start Another Browser War?  More than likely, Chrome will be a strong contender, but Google will need to have deals in place with PC manufacturers to have it preinstalled before it gains even deeper infiltration. The addition of the offer to download the beta on the search homepage could grab them a lot of users, given their market share. Interestingly, they are offering it in the UK and Japan, but China, Germany and France don't have it on their homepages.