You are probably reading this story in a browser. You can take the way you access the internet for granted, or you can run into passionate Safari versus Chrome arguments. Either way, the interface now has been with us for 30 years, and his life was not without controversy.
There are currently five widely used browsers (Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Opera) and they originated from a long, litigious war. But in the beginning there was only one. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, who predicted a public way of envisioning access to the Internet, which he also happened to have a huge share in building.
A NeXT computer and a vision
When the Internet was limited to a small group of people, Berners-Lee, who worked at CERN, sat down at a NeXT computer, wrote down a browser, and called it WorldWideWeb. Not to be confused with the information to which it was the gateway, it was later renamed Nexus.
When it was time for a browser to make its public debut, Nexus encountered a problem: it could only be used on NeXT computers. The browser was thus rewritten by several Berners-Lee CERN colleagues, with most input from intern Nicola Pellow to work on a wider range of computers. The browser was known as a line mode browser because of the line-by-line input method it used. It was first available in CERN and was then launched on the alt.hypertext Usenet newsgroup.
To put the pieces together
The Line Mode Browser could only handle text and where would the web be if it were just like that? Import Mosaic, a browser that can handle graphics and text, from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign.
While Mosaic was not open source, it was free for non-commercial use. As PC Magazine writes in 1994, “Mosaic has probably done more to popularize the Internet than any other software has,” thanks to the “snazzy combination of sleek design and solid code.” It competed with Cello of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, but in 1994 Mosaic ‘became the most common Internet browser’, we wrote, pointing to its dominance of the Unix Internet world.
But while the National Science Foundation was supported and further developed by Mosaic until 1997, it had some competition from its own creators. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina left NCSA in 1994 and set up a business they (eventually) called Netscape.
Marc Andreessen in 1998 (Photo by Bromberger Hoover Photo / Getty Images)
Netscape was the beginning of the brand name browser, but the name originally bore the name Mosaic Communications and the first product was Mosaic Netscape 0.9. A lawsuit with the NCSA has led to a name change for the company and the browser.
Netscape Navigator took over the market almost immediately and continued to dominate it for most of the 1990s, reaching a peak of 90% in 1995, according to Visual Capitalist.
The browser wars
Meanwhile, Microsoft has realized that it has a huge advantage when it comes to browsers, as most of the world uses machines used on the Windows operating system. In 1995, Microsoft bundled a browser called Internet Explorer with Microsoft Plus for Windows 95.
Windows 95 launches in 1995 (Photo credit: TORSTEN BLACKWOOD / AFP via Getty Images)
It did not take long for Internet Explorer (IE) to win over most Internet users, but it did attract the attention of the US government, which has sued Microsoft against antitrust over its practice of preventing computer manufacturers from removing IE and to install other browsers. . The case was finally settled in 2001, but IE had the leading browser for another three years, with a peak of 95% of the market in 2003.
A candidate
By the late ’90s, Netscape was lagging behind. It was acquired by AOL in 1998, a few months after Netscape released its browser to license and release the source code. This made possible the creation of the Mozilla project, which initially focused on innovation in the Netscape browser, but later branched out on its own. Mozilla 1.0 arrived in 2002, and after the launch of the Mozilla Foundation in 2003, Firefox 1.0 landed a year later. AOL finally pulled the plug on Netscape Navigator in 2007.
Looking for something new
Google was founded in 1998, and although it dedicated its early years to search, it developed a browser in 2008 with a single lease from Mozilla. Google Chrome had a slow implementation in its initial year, with about 1% of the market, but now it has the largest share, with about 64% of Internet users.
Do not fall far from the tree
Of course, a look at the history of web browsers would not be complete without the other major operating system manufacturer, Apple. In 2003, the company released Safari for Macs. Although it gave something unique to Mac users, the browser came into its own in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone, when it was mobile. Safari has a quarter of the mobile browser market.
Modern times
Thirty years later, it’s a relatively quiet time in browser history. At Microsoft, IE has made way for Edge, which now runs Google’s Chromium engine, and there are a number of alternative browsers for those with specific needs. Apps compete with browsers around eyeballs, but the top five browsers currently exist relatively.