History Of Browsers

One of the first significant browsers was called Mosaic. It came out in the early 1990's (1993 or so) and completely changed the internet forever. Mosaic was developed for many different platforms (far more than Internet Explorer which came later), including Unix and VMS. More than anything else, it was the success of Mosaic which led directly to the formation of the World Wide Web.

In 1994,  Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics founder) collaborated with Marc Andreessen to found Mosaic Communications. These two had realized the potential value of the World Wide Web and the Mosaic browser. Andreessen had just graduated from the University of Illinois and had been the project leader of the Mosaic project. They worked hard in their new company, and managed to get most of the original technicians from NCSA to join their new company.

In the meantime, a small, little known browser called Opera began it's life. In 1994, two engineers at Telenor (a Norwegian phone company) began development. Opera is completely different from Internet Explorer and Netscape in that it is not based in any way upon Mosaic (the big two are based upon the same code base).

Netscape was released to the public soon after, and it quickly became the hottest and fastest selling product around. Netscape released new versions fast and furious, which made it seem very attractive indeed. Sometimes it seemed like a month would not go by without something new and exciting coming out from this young company. In fact, by 1995 Netscape pretty much owned the browser market, with an estimated 80% market share.

When Windows 95 was released it came with a new web browser of it's own called Internet explorer. By August of 1995 Microsoft belatedly realized that the internet was where the world was going (Microsoft had been trying to create it's own network, similar in concept to America Online and CompuServe) and began furiously developing it's own internet tools. Thus began the browser wars.

Unfortunately for Netscape, Microsoft entered the market with an incredible advantage - Internet Explorer was free of charge. In spite of that, however, Netscape was able to add a whole series of tools and features (including JavaScript, Java support, Plug-Ins, and frames) which kept it in the number one slot.

Slowly (in internet time), however, Internet Explorer gained larger and larger market share. This was because the product got more and more features, which narrowed the technical differences, and it remained free.

In 1997 NCSA ended support for Mosaic so that they could concentrate on other activities. This meant that there were now only two browsers readily available. 

in 1998, Netscape was forced to release a free version of their browser. They went one step further and announced that new versions would be open source.

By this time Internet Explorer had pretty much sewn up the browser wars as the clear winner. IE 3.0 more or less matched Netscape in features and stability, and 4.0 was miles ahead in just about everything. By the release of 5.0 and later 6.0, it was clear that Netscape was more or less dead at a contender. By 2001, Netscape's market share had dropped below 30% and was still falling, while Internet Explorer's share was rising and rising. 

Even the release of Netscape 6.0 was not enough to even slow the decline. A big reason for this was the fact that 6.0 was a horribly buggy release, much worse than virtually any release of any browser product to date.

So now there are three significant browsers for the web. Of course, Internet Explorer is the most popular and best of the browsers. Netscape is second, but, in my humble opinion, Opera is the up-and-coming monster. Opera is a real classy piece of work - fast, efficient and small. It will be interesting to see if it can gain on Internet Explorer (Opera should have no trouble beating out the piece-of-junk Netscape).