Browser Wars

A Digital Massacre

By Declan O'Hern

The first ever internet browser was created along with the invention of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee. In definition, a web browser is used for receiving and communicating information through Lee's World Wide Web. The official browser was released in 1991 for the NeXTstep platform and immediately afterwards, multiple browsers had began to appear setting the stage for a continuous competition between internet search engines. By 1995, only four years later, the browser wars were in full swing.

Some of the earliest browsers included simple HTML viewers such as Line Mode Browser, ViolaWWW and Erwise which were relatively unimpressive but provided internet users with a variety of options. Throughout the late twentieth century, the release of new browsers continued to be released at a constant speed, peaking with the invention of Mosaic, a multi-platform browser invented at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

In 1995, the first official browser war had begun between Internet Explorer for Windows, Netscape Classic, browsers such s Mozilla, Camino and Firefox, and other browsers including Opera, PSP and Safari. As the competition continued, Internet Explorer was ultimately left with little competition due to several advantages of Microsoft Windows including hefty resources and an already lofty share of the desktop operating system market. By 2002, Internet Explorer was the web browser of choice for the majority of internet users resulting in their domination in the first ever war amongst browsers.

As the internet entered the twenty-first century, technology expanded, competition re-ignited, and so began the second browser wars. New advantages such as the ability to reopen recently closed tabs, restoration features in the case of computer crashes and spell check present in these browsers pushed computer-related breakthroughs farther and faster than ever before. Ultimately, the creation of these technologically advanced browsers such as Google, Safari, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, and most recently, Chrome, has dramatically reduced Internet Explorer’s once dominating market share over the last decade.

While Google Chrome currently remains the most popular browser across the world, the popularity of mobile devices increases and the recently developed HTML5 and CSS 3 suggest the possibility of a third browser war. As long as the internet remains a viable source of information, so will fierce competition amongst web browsers.