Browser wars

The term browser wars is the name given to the competition for dominance in the onward.

Statistics reference: Usage share of web browsers

=Early browser competition=

In the early 1990s there were many simple GUI World Wide Web browsers available. The first which reached widespread popularity was Mosaic (web browser), 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 Mozilla. 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.

=The first round of browser wars=

By mid-1995, popular culture had begun to notice the web, and Netscape Navigator was the de facto standard for web browsing at that time. Microsoft 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 dragon mascot atop it, holding a sign reading Netscape 72, Microsoft 18 (representing the market distribution). [http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/stomps.html]

Internet Explorer 4 changed the tides of the browser wars. It was faster and it adopted the World Wide Web Consortium 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.

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 lot 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 lot of influence over its users.

==Internet Explorer dominance==

Microsoft had two strong advantages in the browser wars. One was resources: Netscape began with a nearly 90% 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.

The other, more important, advantage was that Microsoft Windows had a monopoly in the operating system marketplace. 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 enlarge 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.

Other Microsoft actions also hurt Netscape, such as:

*Netscape s business model was to give away its browser but sell server software. Microsoft understood this and attacked Netscape s revenue sources, bundling Microsoft s Internet Information Server web server free with server versions of Windows, and offering Microsoft customers workalike clones of Netscape s proxy server, mail server, news server, and other software free or at steep discounts. This didn t have much effect at first, as much of Netscape s revenues came from customers using Sun Microsystems servers, but the gradual result was to make Windows NT more popular as a server for Internet and Intranet while cutting off Netscape s income. *Microsoft created licensing agreements with computer manufacturers requiring them to provide desktop icons for IE, while penalizing them for shipping Netscape on their computers. *Microsoft made it very easy for small and medium ISPs to release branded versions of Internet Explorer, and with few exceptions they did, meaning that users of many ISPs were encouraged to use Internet Explorer and not Netscape. *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, Microsoft FrontPage, that tended to create pages that looked better in IE. *Microsoft included support for CSS in IE and made IE more tolerant than Netscape for poorly-constructed HTML (such as those generated by some HTML editors). Some web designers found it easier to write their pages for IE only than to fix bad HTML or to support Netscape s LAYER extensions.

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 (which resulted in Microsoft being prosecuted for having used its monopoly status to manipulate the market). 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 AOL 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 browser wars 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; there have been no new versions of Internet Explorer since version 6.0, released in 2001 (which itself was little different from version 5.5, as the main purpose of version 6.0 was to bundle it with Windows XP).

==Consequences==

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

# 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. # 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 by adding <FONT> or <MARQUEE> tags) without waiting for committee approval. New tags like these only rendered properly in the one browser which implemented them, and sometimes caused problems with other browsers.

Web standards were weakened as an outcome of a single company s dominance over the browser market. This causes web development to stagnate with obsolete and unnecessarily complex techniques (such as the abuse of tables for page layouts, when style sheets would be better). Many web developers also write their web pages to work with Internet Explorer s idiosyncrasies rather than stick to the standards, and this means that many web pages only render properly with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 6.0 still lacks compliance with several W3C such as Cascading Style Sheets, the PNG image format, and XHTML.

In addition, Microsoft implemented several proprietary extensions to web technologies, rendering many web pages incompatible with other browsers and platforms. Examples of this are the VBScript and ActiveX extensions, as well as Microsoft s own DHTML implementation.

The near-universal adoption of Internet Explorer has created a Monoculture which has widened the damage done by computer worms, which exploit software vulnerabilities to propagate themselves. The more machines exposing a given vulnerability, the more easily a worm will propagate.

Because Internet Explorer has the word Internet in its name, inexperienced users are sometimes misled into believing that Internet Explorer is the Internet. (Later releases of Windows 95 even had a desktop icon labeled The Internet , which launched Internet Explorer.) This can lead to a belief that other web browsers are less optimal, and can make a browser change difficult to accept.

=The second round of browser wars=

In 1998, Netscape publicly released the source code of Communicator under an open source license, calling the new product Mozilla . Mozilla was eventually rewritten from scratch and improved in many ways. In 2002, Mozilla Application Suite reached version 1.0 and has become popular in the open source community. Many derivative products have been created, including Mozilla s own lightweight multiplatform browser known as Mozilla Firefox, which reached its 1.0 release 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 (a proprietary XML language) to enable developers to build extensive web applications. These can be roughly compared to Mozilla s Cross-platform concept of XUL (XML User-interface Language).

As a response to this, in April for approval.

In February 2005, Microsoft announced that IE 7 (previously planned for the release of Windows Vista) will be available for Windows XP SP2 and later versions of Windows by mid- the new version of Internet Explorer to Windows XP is a move to counter the rapid growth of Mozilla Firefox.

In the first quarter of 2005, Internet Explorer s usage share dropped to around 85%, primarily due to competition from Mozilla Firefox. A major factor in this shift has been the prevalence of computer worms and computer virus, as well as Adware and Spyware. Internet Explorer has been notoriously susceptible to these threats, and as alternative browsers become mature, they are giving users an option to switch.

==Other browser competition==

The Unix-based Konqueror browser is part of the KDE project and competes with Mozilla for market share on Unix-like systems. Konqueror s KHTML engine was adopted by Apple for its WebKit Application programming interface on which the Safari (web browser), Shiira, and OmniWeb browsers are built; Safari is now the default browser on the Apple Macintosh, while OmniWeb has additional features such as its use of miniature renderings (thumbnails) of pages as tabs. It is possible to create a WebKit browser without writing any programming code [http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/01/23/webkit.html], so many Macintosh programs are adding web-browsing functionality.

Although Opera (web browser) has a small desktop computer usage share, it is a popular web browser on mobile devices such as smartphones because of its small footprint. In September 2005, Opera removed the ad banner and licensing fee from their browser with the release of Opera 8.5. They stated their goal was to replace Firefox as the second most used web browser.

=External links=

*[http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm Browser news] – a page with statistics on browser usage *[http://www.evolt.org/article/Browser_Wars_II_The_Saga_Continues/25/60181/ Browser Wars II: The Saga Continues] – an article about the development of the browser wars *[http://software.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html Memoirs From the Browser Wars] – an article about the history of browser wars