A brief history of the original browsers and the First Browser War
One score and ten years ago, our forefathers and foremothers brought forth, not on this continent but at the CERN European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, a world wide web, conceived of a single global hyperlinked information system, and dedicated to the proposition that “all the bits of information in every computer…on the planet, would be available to…anyone.”
Tim Burners-Lee is credited with creating the World Wide Web in 1989. (Although they are often used interchangeably, technically the Internet and the World Wide Web are two different things. The WWW aka “the web” is a collection of information (software) accessed via the Internet, which is the infrastructure (hardware).) In late 1990, Burners-Lee then rolled out the very first web browser, which he named…WorldWideWeb. That wasn’t confusing at all, so it was later renamed Nexus.
The Mosaic Skirmishes
Between 1992 and 1993, several other browsers were developed including ViolaWWW, MidasWWW, MacWWW, tkWWW, (I’m sensing a naming trend) Cello, Arena, Erwise, and Lynx (which is the only one still operating today).
In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released the Mosaic browser, which was amongst the first graphical web browsers, and it quickly rose to dominance. One of its key features was that it gave its users the option to display text and images ON THE SAME PAGE.
As Mosaic rose to the top of the heap, its graphical interface lead to the proliferation of the internet and world wide web expanding outside of academic and research institutions for the first time and being used widely in our homes. Mosaic was licensed out to other companies who built their own browser versions such as AirMosaic and SpyMosaic.
Shortly after its release, one of Mosaic’s lead developers, Marc Andreessen, (sorry) left NCSA and started the Mosaic Communications Corporation because literally no one is capable of coming up with an original name for a browser. Andreessen and his team completely rewrote the code to create a new browser that they originally called Mosaic Netscape (🤦🏻♀️), and what eventually would be known as Netscape Navigator after NCSA was (understandably) a little salty about the name stealing. (The company named changed as well to Netscape Communications Corporation). Netscape Navigator improved on Mosaic’s feature and helped by the fact that it was free for non-commercial use, by 1995 it dominated the browser market share. While in development, the Netscape Navigator browser’s codename was Mozilla, a portmanteau of Mosaic and Godzilla.
The First Browser War
After largely ignoring the world wide web up until this point, in 1995 Microsoft decided to get with the dang times and develop/buy its own browser, and this leads to a nearly six year long war with Netscape. The first version of Internet Explorer was released in August 1995, and this “shot heard round the world” that kicked off the First Browser war was nothing more than a reworked version of the Spyglass Mosaic browser that Microsoft leased from Spyglass, Inc.
At first, Netscape wasn’t too bothered, but then a few months later, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 2.0 free to all users, even commercial ones. Every one else began to follow suit and release their new versions for free to everyone. The war between Netscape and IE for world wide web dominance soon escalated into a release-number measuring battle, complete with an abundance of features added almost overnight that meant there was essentially no way to ensure how a website would look or behave in either browser.
One of the longest lasting features to come out of this first browser was was the development of the Javascript programming language by Brenden Eich in 10 days in May 1995 for Netscape. Other “features” that have been lost to the sands of time include JScript (Microsoft’s bastardized attempt to reverse engineer Javascript for Internet Explorer), and JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS), which attempted to compete with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for a few months in 1996.
Netscape held its own for as long as it could, but in 1997 Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4.0 as the default browser installed with its Windows operating system. A majority of people were buying their very first home computers during this time, and Windows had a 90% share of the desktop operating system market at the time. This meant that for a large majority of people, Internet Explorer was the first and only browser they knew since it came already installed with Windows. Microsoft had engineered a home field advantage in the browser wars that could not be overcome.
Netscape came into the the first browser war with nearly 80% of the market share in 1995, but by the late 90s it proved too small to compete with the Goliath stature of Microsoft and Microsoft’s ability to violate antitrust laws. By 2001, Internet Explorer has no significant competition for browser dominance, and it rested on its laurels for the next five years, only releasing one (one!) update between 2001 and 2006.
The Phoenix Rises
Before its final death knell of being bought by AOL in 1998, Netscape open-sourced their browser code, and it was later entrusted to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. This lead to a community effort to produce a phoenix-rising browser from Netscape’s ashes (originally literally called The Phoenix until trademark issued forced it to be renamed Firefox). This would begin the Second Browser War, which rages on to this day.
