A brief article on the Browser Wars.
Netscape came and Charged us to surf the web.
When Netscape launched its first and
indeed foremost web browser "Navigator", it
set a price tag for it. Due to the success of
its then-famous browser, Netscape launched its
initial public offering on Aug. 9, 1995. The company set its offering price at $28 per share.
This was a bold move for a company looking to
sell five million shares on the strength of a
single piece of software.
Microsoft responded by giving us freedom.
The share price eventually hit $70 per
share, and this would naturally, catch the
eyes of other then-big players in the software
industry. Microsoft, of course, immediately
realized the immense opportunity before it in the
area of surfing the web. They responded with the
internet explorer in 1995 which was bundled with
its' then-Windows 95 operating system. Better
still, they made it completely free. This
naturally would mark the beginning of trouble for
Netscape's Navigator.
Netscape reacted by sprucing up its
browser with more features. Microsoft immediately
added or copied similar features to its browser
(Internet Explorer) also. From there henceforth
was a competition of adding features by
Netscape and adding or copying of similar features
by Microsoft. This consequently led to the two
browsers becoming slower and slower as more
features were added to each of them. It also split
the internet into two worlds—one that displayed
well in Navigator and one that displayed well in
Internet Explorer.
Netscape had to bow to the inevitable
inevitable, and eventually dropped its fee in
January 1998. In the end, Microsoft won the
browser war against Netscape because it had the
advantage of bundling its browser with its operating system which was used in more than 90%
of the personal computers sold by then. Internet
explore consequently, became the most popular
browser, relegating Netscape's Navigator to the
background.
Explorer lived and rained for a long time
but not without issues. One - because of the
bugginess and slowness of the explorer, and
without the willingness to accept defeat, Netscape
rebranded to Mozilla Foundation and came back
with a much-improved browser on 23 September 2002,
better than Internet Explorer. This time it
was completely free.
Firefox became an instant heat, drawing
users away from Explorer and also offering
a browsing experience. Microsoft was complacent and
didn't do much to challenge the new threat before
it. Firefox kept growing, but with drawbacks as
well: the slowness is still there, and very much
noticeable. It wasn't yet the ideal browser.
Another note worth mentioning is the entrance
of other competitors, like Opera in 1995, which
started as Opera Mini on Feature phones, and then
as Opera Mobile, until it eventually came to PCs
also.
The birth of Chrome.
In 2008, Google, which was already a
search engine giant as at then entered the scene.
Chrome browser was born.
Google's Chrome browser was fast and
responsive and therefore took care of all the
challenges web surfers had with the previous browsers.
With their Chromium engine, which they eventually
made open source, Google redefined Web Browsers
and indeed, web Browsing. It quickly drew users
away from both Explorer and Firefox. This would
just mark a natural course - the death slow but
steady death of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
The death of Explorer and the Birth of Edge.
Internet Explorer was retired and had
been out of support since June 15, 2022. But in
response, Microsoft took the Chromium engine and
built a new browser which as of today is known as
Edge.
Firefox re-engineered.
Firefox has also responded to the Chrome threat by building a new engine for their Firefox
browser: "the Gecko Engine." This has made the Firefox
browser to be at the same level as Chrome. Will it
be enough to make it dominate Chrome? That will be
something we have to wait and see.
Finally.
The browser wars have brought us to the point where we have many web Browsers out there
doing the same thing but in a slightly different
ways. This may not be a headache to web surfers as
it is to web developers, but it's something we(web
developers) will have to live with it for the rest of
our lives, hahaha.
On a final note, we also have the
Safari browser which has kept to Apple's way of
doing things by being completely different from
the rest of the bunch since its launch on 7
January 2003.
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