Browser Wars Episode I: The Neutering of an Underdog
The relatively thin sliver of history that our species has hitherto occupied has produced a surprising number of wars. Many of these have been bloody, finding themselves subject to the sorts of brutality that result from direct conflict. Others have been treacherous, taking the action from the battlefield to more abstract mediums, yet still producing many victims along the way. The great Browser Wars of the 1990s fall into the latter category, though to a more pronounced degree than many realize.
You may have heard references to these great struggles in the past, though it is possible that you may not fully appreciate their implications. If you’ve used a browser before (chances are overwhelmingly likely that you’re using one right now), this story affects you. While in 2019 it seems like the two technologies are virtually inseparable, the marriage of the internet and “browsers” as we know them, is a relatively recent one. The first real usage of the internet occurred in computer science laboratories in the 1950s and 1960s, and was generally in the context of transmitting information during times of war. The first browser, known as the “World Wide Web”, was released in 1991, with English scientist Tim Berners-Lee being the credited inventor. While this release was certainly revolutionary, this new technology hadn’t really broken into mainstream usage by average consumers, and instead remained in the realm of computer science specialists and programmers. Enter Mosaic browser in 1993.
Developed by a group of young engineers and a wealthy financier at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Mosaic was likely the earliest recognizable ancestor to the modern web browser. Its point-and-click Graphical User Interface (GUI) offered a new and exciting user experience. One leading engineer on the browser, co-founder of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, and the future creator of new web browser Mosaic Netscape, was Marc Andreessen. He alleges that the Mosaic browser was released as a soft-launch to 12 volunteers for beta-testing, and from there it spread virally, to over 1 million users, over the course of only 9 months.
As quoted by researcher Mark Pesce in 1995 work “A Brief History of Cyberspace”:
“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.”
While in the current day this browser certainly wouldn’t drop any jaws (and would likely cause some headaches), at the time Mosaic was released, it was seen as revolutionary, and created a new standard for the interaction of the average consumer with the internet.
In 1994, Mosaic Communications Corporation, then re-named Netscape Communications Corporation, released Netscape Navigator. This name may not get much recognition in 2019, but at the time the overnight boom of popularity in this product had had immediate impacts on consumer and technology culture, capturing around 95% of total browser usage at the time. The term “NetScaping” had become synonymous with using the internet and “surfing the web.”
Unfortunately for Netscape, this heyday was violently disrupted, and this internet supremacy was intensely challenged by a Goliath of sorts: a well-known company by the name of Microsoft. To make a long story short, at the time Microsoft enjoyed the status of being “ruler of the roost” when it came to software, making a bold entrance in its two decades of existence as a software company, and coming to dominate the personal computer market over the last decade in particular. Microsoft was credited with edging out other big technology companies such as IBM, and was seen as a bit of a sacred cow in information technology at that point. Microsoft took great issue with Netscape and the release of their browser. While one might envision the wrath of Microsoft originating from perceived threats of Netscape Navigator to the success of Internet Explorer, the actual account of events moved in very much the opposite direction; Internet Explorer was used primarily as a means in this story, not an end.
Microsoft made its bones by developing base-level software for computers. While there were many companies developing software products at the time, many used Windows and other Microsoft products as an underlying system for developing their own products, awarding Microsoft a hefty sum in licensing fees. Due to the fact that Windows was so ubiquitous in the 1990s, Microsoft had deals with many computer hardware developers to have the software installed as the default in their products. All-in-all, besides an intermittent scuffle with the United States Department of Justice regarding violation of anti-trust laws, Microsoft had a pretty good gig going when it came to domination in software. More than a worry that Netscape would shut Microsoft out of future browser development, Microsoft experienced a concern that this new “browser” technology might carry with it new opportunities for software administration, and with it the obsolescence, either in whole or in part, of their business model. Microsoft refused to be a laggard, and decided to tackle the “web browser” issue head on.
Shortly after the Netscape Navigator release, Microsoft initiated a meeting at Netscape’s headquarters. While the content of the meeting isn’t agreed upon by both parties, it is seen as one of the first major encounters of the Browser Wars. Microsoft, who was by far the more powerful company at the time, alleges that the meeting was a laid-back exchange of software ideas, with no kind of formal agreement being reached. Netscape told a different story. At the time, the company alleged that Microsoft, who was known to play hardball, offered them a one-time $1,000,000 fee to have unlimited access to their products. Microsoft was a company that was known to leverage its market share in software. Netscape alleged threats that, if this offer was to be refused, Microsoft would copy their business ideas, and, with their superior resources, would drive them into bankruptcy. Netscape, who had recently hired anti-trust lawyer Gary Reback, a man who had already pursued legal action against Microsoft in the past, urged him to contact the US Justice Department in preparation for a lawsuit.
In an almost immediate reaction to this meeting, and at the behest of co-founder James Clark, Netscape went public. The company’s shares increased dramatically, and caused revenues to skyrocket, along with media attention. Rather than falling in line with the other software companies of the day, who gladly knelt and kissed the Microsoft ring, Netscape was known to act with disdain towards the company, providing negative press in interviews and other media.
In 1995, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0, and the competition was off to the races. Not only was the battle between Microsoft and Netscape a commercial one, it was also technological, even resulting in the development of new programming languages to edge out competition. The degree of intellectual property theft on the part of Microsoft was staggering. In 1995, in the time-frame a little over one week, engineer and Netscape employee Brendan Eich developed the “JavaScript” language (one of the most in-use programming languages today) in an attempt to increase functionality in the Netscape browser. This new language was designed with similar syntax to the well-known language Java. Mosaic had been released with static HTML pages, whereas the goal of JavaScript was to make pages more dynamic and interactive for the user. The goal was successfully reached. While JavaScript ended up being quite different from Java, it incorporated the name for marketing purposes, and at the time Netscape paid licensing fees to Sun Microsystems, a company that owned the Java intellectual property. Microsoft, wanting to develop a near identical project while undercutting the competition, developed “JScript” — a language similar in functionality but dissimilar enough from Java that no license fees were owed.
Due to the fact that the competition was so fierce between Microsoft and Netscape, the usage of these “scripting” languages, and their functionality, was actually very important to the affair. A nightmare scenario for an engineer from one of the two companies would be a situation in which, upon attempting to access a given webpage, a user would receive a message prompting them to switch to the browser of the competitor. This resulted in divergence between the scripting languages and ultimately led to their need to be standardized by a central authority, commonly known as European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA), starting in 1996.
The battle for browser dominance raged on in other ways, though for many reasons ended up being unsustainable. While each company had the interest of capturing the market for browsers, the fight was extremely lopsided, a fact which brought the dispute to a relatively quick end. Netscape had ingenuity, grit and determination, but Microsoft had control of market share in ways that gave them victory before the fight had really started. Microsoft was able to successfully leverage the licensing deals it had with computer hardware companies to benefit the trajectory of Internet Explorer. They would even go so far as to blacklist hardware companies from using Windows if they didn’t also actively distribute Internet Explorer (or made any kind of distribution deals with Netscape). In being a diversified behemoth, Microsoft also had the ability to provide Internet Explorer as a free service, or “freeware” for all Windows users. Netscape, being a much smaller company and one whose bottom line relied much more heavily on direct revenue from its software, was unable to do this. To top it off, Microsoft could distribute Internet Explorer as the default browser on all of its Windows products, and in likely being the only browser that most of its users had ever encountered, it was almost never replaced by another option. Microsoft was slowly tightening its grip on the browser market, but not necessarily to the end of attaining revenue, as much as it was to drive Netscape out of business.
By late 1997, these factors had all compounded in favor of Microsoft and against Netscape. Netscape still enjoyed about 72% of the browser market share, against Internet Explorer’s 18%, however this was rapidly changing, accelerated by the release of highly successful Internet Explorer 4.0. By 2001, Internet Explorer would enjoy over 90% of browser market share, and the trend that would lead to this outcome was becoming increasingly apparent to all parties.
At the September 1997 Internet Explorer 4.0 launch party (which Microsoft had snidely decided to hold in San Francisco, near Netscape headquarters), a few key members of the Microsoft team decided to dump a 9-foot Internet Explorer logo on the Netscape lawn as a sign of dominance. The Netscape team retaliated by sending back the logo with a statue of their own on top. The site is a great one to behold:
Still, at this point, Netscape had been defeated, and nobody knew it more than they did. In 1999 the company was sold to AOL, and is now a property of Verizon Communications. It has since resurfaced through the branding of Mozilla (a compound of the words Mosaic and Godzilla). While Mozilla FireFox is a well-known browser, it only sits at about 5% usage on a global scale today.
In 1998, the lawsuits against Microsoft culminated in a deposition by the US Justice Department, which resulted in a guilty verdict again Bill Gates for violations of anti-trust laws by Microsoft. While originally the verdict came along with a mandate that the company be broken into two, this requirement was rescinded, and the Microsoft behemoth was allowed to stay whole. Still, the media backlash against Bill Gates as a personality was enough for him to leave the Microsoft company, and today he engages in primarily philanthropic affairs.
There is much more of this story to be told, but it will not be addressed in this article. Rather, at the moment, we can evaluate this particular phase of the great Browser Wars as a profound example of corporate influence on technology. One can only wonder what would have become of Netscape and other smaller companies like it, along with their products, had large, established companies not acted as gatekeepers to the industry.
If your curiosity on this topic has been whetted, then there’s good news — this work is part of a larger trilogy detailing the events of this story. Part II can be found here.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VANORrzKX50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUAmiIsp2YU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VANORrzKX50
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
Photo credit:
https://wisewordsfrom.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/ie-vs-netscape.jpg?w=300&h=230
http://www.neowin.net/images/uploaded/ie1.png
http://adrianroselli.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Netscape1-about-1024x656.gif
