Has Chromium Already Won the Browser War?

With the non-commercial introduction of Netscape Navigator in 1995 and the beginning of the Internet Explorer era at the same time, the Web as we know started taking shape. A Dotcom bubble followed where thousands of Tech startups gained the advantage of the rise of the Internet and Internet-based applications but few failed, those which survived are today’s Internet Giants. The first Browser war was between these two competitors, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mosaic derived Netscape Navigator. Navigator had its peak usage share until 1997 which slowly started declining thereafter.

The rise of Internet Explorer and fall of Navigator [Wikipedia]

By 2001, Microsoft’s strategies made Internet Explorer a huge success with more than 75% market share worldwide. The year 2004 saw the surviving transition of Netscape Navigator into the open source Mozilla Firefox, as we know it today. Though Opera was available since 1996, it started gaining some noticeable market fraction only after 2004. While Internet Explorer was the default Web browser on Apple’s classic Mac and OS X, Safari superseded it with the introduction of OS X Panther in 2003.

The new Safari was based on KHTML browser engine and KJS JavaScript engine derived from open source KDE project, later renamed by Apple as WebKit. It was rumored that Google was developing its own web browser in 2004. In the meantime, Internet Explorer suffered a huge loss of market share to Firefox because of the security concerns that it carried.

Drop in market share of Internet Explorer

The following years had no apparent change in the graph with Internet Explorer having its counter at 60% and Mozilla Firefox at 30%.

The initial releases of Google Chrome in 2008 didn’t gain much traction from the crowd which slowly started changing in 2011. With the popularity of Google itself and its recommendations, people started switching from IE to Chrome while Firefox maintained its position.

Debut of Chrome and dethrone of IE

While Opera had always maintained its lead in mobile market, the years following 2009 saw a sudden change in the usage share. Apple introduced its Safari browser for iPhone and Google’s Android browser quickly became standard for many OEMs. The Chinese UC browser appeared in 2011 which quickly took the position of Opera’s share and became dominant mobile browser. [Statcounter]

The beginning of true Mobile era

While all the browsers were developing independently, all of them had support for most of the Web standards. Google initially used the same WebKit that Safari shipped with but in 2013 they forked the WebKitCore component under the name Blink. The idea behind this move was to reduce the code base by removing Safari specific codes and making Chrome more lightweight. Opera had long development history on its Presto engine which it dropped, migrating to Blink and later announcing to join hands with Google on its open source project Chromium. A new competitor Vivaldi appeared with the goal of maintaining Opera’s legacy Presto but in time, it joined the Chromium development and all code updates to Presto seized completely. Mozilla continued its development on Gecko while criticizing Opera for letting Google monopolize the browser market. The engine used by IE was Chakra which was later dubbed as Edge-Chakra for the newly introduced web browser Microsoft Edge for Windows 10.

The 3rd browser war shaping up

The code migration worked for Google and Chrome was the new leader in the browser war, gaining user base even from Firefox. Many Chromium based browsers started appearing, Opera and Vivaldi being one of the first followed by privacy centric Brave Browser.

In 2017, Mozilla announced a new project Firefox Quantum, emphasizing on the development of Web for next generation. Quantum was based on the experimental Servo project, which was ported to Android as GeckoView providing an alternative to Google’s WebView. The Firefox Focus was introduced the following year for Android devices. The new browser focuses on privacy and speed. The project is still under active development and hasn’t reached a stable point yet. The desktop Mozilla Firefox lost a huge user base to Chromium based alternatives going down to 7% market share by the end of 2018.

The following year, Microsoft announced to seize all developments on IE derived Edge code base and migrate to Chromium. In 2020, Microsoft introduced the new Chromium based Edge with its own UI and integration with Microsoft products. The browser war is now shrunken to only Mozilla backed Gecko and Blink backed by Google, Microsoft, Opera and others.

Web is heading towards a monopoly

With about 70% market share of Chromium based projects and no visible alternatives to Chrome (apart from Safari on OS X), the world is already seeing the monopoly in Browser battle. Firefox is struggling to gain a stable user base on Windows while it’s still leading the Linux world (no sources). With the boom of Android based smartphones and moves taken by Microsoft and Google, it is clear that Chromium/Blink has already won the browser battle. Firefox may make a comeback but apparently there’s no chance of seeing a 3rd browser gaining any popularity.

Thanks for reading.