Browser wars

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term "browser wars" is the name given to the competition for dominance in the web browser marketplace. The term is most commonly used to refer to two specific periods of time: the particularly intense struggle between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator during the late 1990s, and the growing threat which Mozilla Firefox poses to Internet Explorer from 2004 onward.

Statistics reference: Usage share of web browsers

Contents 1 Early browser competition 2 The first browser war 2.1 Internet Explorer dominance 2.2 Consequences 3 The second browser war 4 Other browser competition 4.1 Microsoft Windows 4.2 Linux and Unix 4.3 Mac OS 4.4 Mobile Devices 5 References 6 Notes 7 External links

[edit] Early browser competition

In the early 1990s there were many simple graphic-oriented World Wide Web browsers available. The first which reached widespread popularity was Mosaic, developed at NCSA. Several companies licensed it to create their own commercial browsers, such as Spry Mosaic and Spyglass Mosaic.

One of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreesen, founded the company Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mosaic Netscape. To resolve legal issues with NCSA, the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser improved on Mosaic's usability and reliability, and it soon dominated the market, helped by the fact that "evaluation copies" of the browser were downloadable without restrictions or cost.

[edit] The first browser war

By mid-1995, the World Wide Web gradually began receiving a great deal of attention in the popular culture and mass media. Netscape Navigator was the dominant and most widely used web browser at that time, while Microsoft had just licensed Mosaic as the basis of Internet Explorer 1.0 which it released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus! Pack in August 1995. Internet Explorer 2.0 was released three months later, and by then the race was on.

New versions of Netscape Navigator (later Netscape Communicator) and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years. Features often took priority over bug fixes, and therefore the browser wars were a time of unstable browsers, shaky Web standards compliance, frequent crashes, security holes, and lots of user headaches. Internet Explorer only began to approach par with its competition with version 3.0 (1996), which offered scripting support and the market's first commercial Cascading Style Sheets implementation.

In October 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found that giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached which read "From the IE team." The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dinosaur mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" (representing the market distribution).^[1]

Internet Explorer 4 changed the tides of the browser wars. It was faster and it adopted the W3C's published specifications more faithfully than Netscape Navigator 4.0. Unlike Netscape, it provided the possibility for truly "dynamic" pages in which the flow of the text and images of the page could be altered after the page was loaded. Installing Internet Explorer 4.0 was considered as a system upgrade that would provide more capabilities such as MP3 playback and, optionally, the Windows Desktop Update.

During these times it was common for web designers to display 'best viewed in Netscape' or 'best viewed in Internet Explorer' logos. These images often identified a specific browser version and were commonly linked to a source from which the "preferred" browser could be downloaded. To some extent, these logos were indicative of the divergence between the "standards" supported by the browsers and signified which browser was used for testing the pages. Supporters of the notion that web sites should be interoperable with any browser started the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign.

A lot was at stake for these two companies involved in the browser wars. A popular web browser could earn a great deal of money: search engine companies would bid to be the default tool used in the web browser, and other companies with a web presence would bid to be listed in the default set of bookmarks which was preinstalled with the browser. Since a web browser is a powerful gateway to a great deal of information, the company which controlled this gateway could conceivably have a great deal of influence over its users.

[edit] Internet Explorer dominance

Microsoft had three strong advantages in the browser wars. One was resources: Netscape began with about 80% market share and a good deal of public goodwill, but as a relatively small company deriving the great bulk of its income from what was essentially a single product (Navigator and its derivatives), it was financially vulnerable. Netscape's total revenue never exceeded the interest income generated by Microsoft's cash on hand.

Another advantage was that Microsoft Windows had over 90% share of the operating system market. IE was bundled with every copy of Windows; therefore, even though early versions of IE were markedly inferior to Netscape's browser, Microsoft was still able to increase its market share. And IE remained free while the enormous revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and marketing, resulting in rapid improvements until it was so similar to Netscape feature-wise that users had no desire to download and install Netscape.

Thirdly it was faster and it adopted the W3C's published specifications more faithfully than Netscape Navigator 4.0. Unlike Netscape, it provided the possibility for truly "dynamic" pages in which the flow of the text and images of the page could be altered after the page was loaded.

Other Microsoft actions also hurt Netscape, such as:

• Microsoft created a licensing agreement with AOL to base AOL's primary interface on IE rather than Netscape.
• Microsoft purchased and released a web authoring tool, FrontPage, making it easy to utilise proprietary extensions and non-standard HTML code in web pages.
• Microsoft included support for CSS in IE. Some web designers found it easier to write their pages for IE only than to support Netscape's proprietary LAYER extensions.
• Microsoft locked up a large portion of the Macintosh browser market in 1997 as part of its agreement with Apple that year. The agreement made Internet Explorer the default browser on the Mac for five years.

The effect of these actions were to "cut off Netscape's air supply" as stated by a Microsoft executive during the United States v. Microsoft case. This, together with several bad business decisions on Netscape's part, led to Netscape's defeat by the end of 1998, after which the company was acquired by America Online for USD $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer became the new dominant browser, attaining a peak of about 96% of the web browser usage share during 2002, more than Netscape had at its peak.

The first browser war ended when Internet Explorer ceased to have any serious competition for its market share. This also brought an end to the rapid innovation in web browsers; until 2006 there was only one new version of Internet Explorer since version 6.0 was released in 2001. Not surprisingly, Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 for Windows XP SP2 was developed as part of Windows XP SP2 and as part of the integration of Windows XP SP2 enhancements into Windows Server 2003 SP1, Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 for Windows XP SP2 enhancements are integrated the IE 6 for Windows Server 2003.

[edit] Consequences

The browser wars encouraged two specific kinds of behavior among their combatants.

1. Adding new features instead of fixing bugs: A web browser had to have more new features than its competition, or else it would be considered to be "falling behind." But with limited manpower to put towards development, this often meant that quality assurance suffered and that the software was released with serious bugs.
2. Adding proprietary features instead of obeying standards: A web browser was expected to follow the standards set down by standards committees (for example, by adhering to the HTML specifications). But competition and innovation required that web browsers extend the standards with proprietary features (such as the HTML tags <font>, <marquee>, and <blink>) without waiting for committee approval. Sometimes these extensions led to useful techniques that were adopted by other browsers, such as the XMLHttpRequest technology that resulted in Ajax. More often than not, however, these extensions proved harmful.

Support for web standards was severely weakened. For years, innovation in web development stagnated as developers had to use obsolete and unnecessarily complex techniques to ensure their pages would render properly in Netscape Navigator. Netscape Navigator lacked full compliance with several standards, such as CSS and the PNG image format.

The near-universal adoption of Internet Explorer had also created a monoculture which has widened the damage done by malicious code.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] The second browser war

Since Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released in 2004 Mozilla and Mozilla-based browsers have established a growing niche in the browser market.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer version 6.0 SP1 would be the last standalone version of its browser. Future enhancements would be dependent on Windows Vista, which will include new tools such as the Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML to enable developers to build extensive web applications.

As a response to this, in April 2004 the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software joined efforts to develop new open technology standards which add more capability while remaining backwards-compatible with existing technologies.^[2] The result of this collaboration was WHATWG, a working group devoted to the fast creation of new standard definitions which will then be submitted to the W3C for approval.

In February 2005, Microsoft announced that IE 7 would be available for Windows XP SP2 and later versions of Windows by mid-2005.^[3] The announcement introduced the new version of the browser as a major upgrade over IE 6 SP1. Some believe that this decision to backport the new version of Internet Explorer to Windows XP is a move to counter the rapid growth of Mozilla Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7 was finally released in October 2006. It included features such as tabbed browsing, a search bar, and improved support for web standards. Additionally, it included a phishing filter and a radical GUI redesign. Microsoft distributed Internet Explorer 7 to Windows users as a high priority update through Microsoft Update.^[4]

Firefox 2.0, launched in late October 2006, also included a phishing filter and GUI redesign, as well as a spell-checker for text fields and several other new features.

[edit] Other browser competition

[edit] Microsoft Windows

Although it currently only has a small desktop usage share, Opera is the third most popular browser on Windows (it is also available on other platforms, including Linux, Mac OS, and the Nintendo Wii). In September 2005, Opera removed the ad banner and licensing fee from their browser with the release of Opera 8.5. Their stated goal was to replace Firefox as the second most used web browser.

Other notable browsers for Windows are Netscape 8 (an Internet Explorer/Firefox hybrid), SeaMonkey (a replacement for the Mozilla Application Suite), Maxthon (formerly MyIE2; it uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine and has features such as tabbed browsing), and Avant Browser (An Internet Explorer shell).

[edit] Linux and Unix

The Unix-based Konqueror browser is part of the KDE project and is the primary competitor against Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox, Mozilla/SeaMonkey, Epiphany, Galeon, etc.) for market share on Unix-like systems. Konqueror's KHTML engine is an API for the KDE desktop. Derivative browsers and web-browsing functionality (for example, Amarok has a Wikipedia sidebar that gives information about the current artist) based on KDE use KHTML.^[5]

[edit] Mac OS

Safari is Apple's web browser and is the most popular web browser for Mac OS X^[6] The web browser is based off of KHTML. Other browsers include Shiira, and OmniWeb, which use the API WebKit, and many Macintosh programs are adding web-browsing functionality.^[7]

Camino is a Mozilla-based browser for the Mac OS X platform, and uses Mac's native Cocoa interface like Safari does, instead of Mozilla's XUL which is used in Firefox.

[edit] Mobile Devices

Opera Mini is a popular web browser on mobile devices such as smartphones because of its small footprint, and whose main competition is from Netfront. PC Site Viewer, the web browser included on many Japanese cellular phones, is based on Opera. In February, 2006 it was announced that Nintendo "will release an add-on card" with a version of Opera for the Nintendo DS (Nintendo DS Browser).^[8] Opera is also used as a web browser on the Wii console.

Windows Mobile comes with Pocket Internet Explorer by default and competes with Opera, Netfront and Mozilla's Minimo.

[edit] References

• DOJ/Antitrust: U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division. Civil Action No. 98-1232 (Antitrust) Complaint, United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation. May 18, 1998. Press release: Justice Department Files Antitrust Suit Against Microsoft for Unlawfully Monopolizing Computer Software Markets

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Browser Statistics – Month by month comparison spanning from 2002 and onward (2006) displaying the usage share of browsers among web developers.
• Browser news – a page with statistics on browser usage
• Browser Wars II: The Saga Continues – an article about the development of the browser wars
• Memoirs From the Browser Wars – an article about the history of browser wars
• Browser Wars Game – A Connect Four style game, based on browsers.
• Browser War Checkers - Visitor (Firefox) plays against computer (Internet Explorer).
• Browser War project - The project to determine which browser (IE, FF or Opera) is the most popular.