A Short History of Web Browsers & why each reacts a little differently
This post was written for : The ones going from Zero to One in web development.
The very first time I heard about CERN was when they announced the existence of the Higgs Boson sub-atomic particle — in 2012. It was also called the god particle. The CERN research center in Switzerland is known to operate the largest particle physics laboratory. It’s the avantgarde of humanity’s understanding of physics; its Large Hadron Collider is the James Web Space Telescope of the nuclear world.
Perhaps not a likely place for the birth of web-browsers that help us watch true-crime or TikTok. But CERN was where Sir Tim Berners-Lee (TimBL) was working when he wrote the code for Nexus : the first ever browser. Nexus was originally called WorldWideWeb, later renamed to avoid ambiguity.
Information is stored in different computers, though these computers were linked, it wasn’t easy to find and access what one needed. There were no hyper-links, search bars or indices. If I didn’t understand a scientific word, I couldn’t just click on it to read the related document.
TimBL wanted to solve this problem — primarily for scientific information. He wanted to make jumping across documents as easy as clicking on an underlined blue word. Uber, Tinder or Netflix was not on his mind — at all.
He also wanted to make creating these documents easy — create headings, mark hyperlinks, list indices, table data, insert images and such. So Nexus wasn’t only a browser that could read but also a WYSIWYG web-page editor. If you knew how to use a word-processor, you would feel at home with such an editor. (WYSIWYG : What you see is what you get).
WorldWideWeb was TimBL’s Christmas gift to the world in 1990. He had taken just two months to complete the first version. It was renamed to Nexus in 1994.
Code that is written for one platform will not readily work on another. It’s like writing instructions to get from home to school — it won’t work if you change towns. Steve Jobs, who was running NeXT back then had gifted a NeXT Cube to TimBL, and all the code was written on it, for it. No one on the team knew how to port that code to work for other platforms, so it was rewritten by other teams and organizations — mostly in C or C++.
There were a lot of browsers after Nexus; many died and the world of today has landed on: Chrome by Google, Firefox by Mozilla, Safari by Apple, Edge by Microsoft and Opera by . . whoever makes Opera. Knowing that each browser was coded by a different team, and that each team had their own list of priorities, with their own unique approaches to solve problems explains why each browser reacts differently.
What font should be used if no font-face is mentioned? How much space should separate the elements by default? If the image is larger than the screen, what’s the default behavior? There are thousands of such questions that need to be answered by the browser-team — unless, we have an organization that sets standards.
Tim Berners-Lee set up World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a standards organization. But, the industry (Apple, Mozilla, Google & Microsoft) didn’t like the slow pace of it, and they set up WHATWG in 2004. It is this organization that sets the standard now — called the HTML Living Standard.
The HTML Living Standard is a living document, which means that it continuously evolves to support the current world. The standard continuously expects more from the browsers.
It takes time for the browser teams to take those new expectations and add features to their browsers. Some teams are better funded, have better engineers or better leadership and each team chooses what they will work on first — so we notice that some browsers support a new feature while another doesn’t.
As a developer, one doesn’t want to use a feature that’s not supported by all the main browsers, and now we know why all the browsers are not the same.