Browser wars
[5] In 1990, Berners-Lee created the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, subsequently known as Nexus,[6] and made it available for the NeXTstep Operating System, by NeXT.
By 1995, helped by the fact that it was free for non-commercial use, the browser dominated the emerging World Wide Web.
[9] 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.
By mid-1995, the World Wide Web had received a great deal of attention in popular culture and the mass media.
[12] Unlike Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer 1.0 was available to all Windows users free of charge, including commercial companies.
[14] Netscape Navigator and competitor products like InternetWorks, Quarterdeck Browser, InterAp, and WinTapestry were bundled with other applications to full Internet suites.
New features were routinely added, including Netscape's JavaScript (subsequently replicated by Microsoft as JScript) and proprietary HTML tags such as
Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found the logo on their front lawn, paired with greeting card signed "Best wishes, the IE team".
Most mainstream websites, however, specified one of Netscape or Internet Explorer as their preferred browser while making some attempt to support minimal functionality on the other.
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.
[19] Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with every copy of Windows, which had over a 95% share of the desktop operating system market in June 2004,[20] allowing the company to obtain market share more easily than Netscape as customers already had Internet Explorer installed as the default browser.
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.
Development continued for several years with little widespread adoption until a stripped-down browser-only version of the full suite, which included new features such as a separate search bar (which had previously only appeared in the Opera browser), was created.
Mozilla's Firefox 1 was released on November 9, 2004,[23] and it then continued to gain an increasing share of the browser market until a peak of around 24% in 2010.
[24] In response, in April 2004, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software joined efforts to develop new open-technology standards which add more capability while remaining backward-compatible with existing technologies.
[25] The result of this collaboration was the WHATWG, a working group devoted to the fast creation of new standard definitions that would be submitted to the W3C for approval.
Instead of advertising their proprietary extensions, browser developers began to market their software based on how closely it adhered to standards.
[27] 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.
[28] 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 December 19, 2007, the company announced that an internal build of that version had passed the Acid2 CSS test in "IE8 standards mode" — the last of the major browsers to do so.
[37][38] 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.
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.
[41] Apple created forks of the open-source KHTML and KJS layout and JavaScript engines from the KDE Konqueror browser in 2002.
They explained that those provided a basis for easier development than other technologies by being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed, and standards-compliant.
On April 29, 2010, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter regarding his Thoughts on Flash, and the place it would hold on Apple's iOS devices and web browsers.
Shortly after, an open-sourced version for the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms was released under the name Chromium.
[58] At the same time, Net Applications reported Internet Explorer firmly in first place, with Google Chrome almost overtaking Firefox as the second.
[71] 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.
[75] By April 2019, worldwide Google Chrome usage share crossed 70% across personal computers and remained over 60% combining all devices.
