You are probably reading this story in a browser. You could take how to access the Internet for granted, or you could get into passionate Safari vs Chrome arguments. Anyway, the interface now has been with us for 30 years, and his life has not been without controversy.
There are currently five widely used browsers (Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera), and they have emerged from a long litigation war. But in the beginning there was only one. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, who proposed a public way to access the Internet, which he also happened to have built a huge role in.
A new computer and a vision
When the Internet was limited to a small group of people, Berners-Lee, who worked at CERN, sat down in front of a NeXT computer, wrote a browser, and called it WorldWideWeb. In order not to confuse it with the information to which it was the gateway, it was later renamed Nexus.
When it came time for a browser to make its public debut, Nexus posed a problem: it could only be used on NeXT computers. So the browser was rewritten by several of Berners-Lee’s CERN colleagues, with most of the input coming from intern Nicola Pellow, to work on a wider range of computers. The browser became known as a Line Mode Browser because of the line-by-line text entry method it used. It was first available through CERN and then introduced in the alt.hypertext Usenet newsgroup.
Merge the pieces
The line mode browser could only handle text and where would the web be if that were only? Visit Mosaic, a browser that can handle images 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. Like PC Magazine wrote in 1994, “Mosaic has probably done more to make the Internet more popular than any other piece of software,” thanks to its “cool combination of slick design and solid code.” It competed with Cello at the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, but by 1994 Mosaic was “becoming the most widespread Internet browser,” we wrote, pointing to the dominance of the Unix Internet world.
But while Mosaic was supported and further developed by the National Science Foundation until 1997, it had some competition from its own creators. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina left NCSA in 1994 and went on to found a company called (eventually) Netscape.
Marc Andreessen in 1998 (Photo by Bromberger Hoover Photo / Getty Images)
Netscape was the start of the name brand browser, but the company originally went by the name Mosaic Communications and the first product was Mosaic Netscape 0.9. A settlement with the NCSA led to a name change for the company and the browser.
Netscape Navigator took over the market almost immediately and continued to dominate for most of the 1990s, peaking at 90% in 1995, according to Visual Capitalist.
The Browser Wars
Meanwhile, Microsoft realized that it had a huge advantage when it came to browsers as most of the world used machines running the Windows operating system. In 1995, Microsoft bundled a browser called Internet Explorer with Microsoft Plus for Windows 95.
Windows 95 launch in 1995 (photo credit: TORSTEN BLACKWOOD / AFP via Getty Images)
It didn’t take long for Internet Explorer (IE) to convince most Internet users, but that did attract the attention of the US government, which filed antitrust charges against Microsoft for its practice of preventing computer manufacturers from uninstalling IE and other browsers to install. . The case was finally settled in 2001, but IE had three more years to be the leading browser, peaking at 95% of the market in 2003.
A contender
In the late 1990s, Netscape limped. It was acquired by AOL in 1998, several months after Netscape released its browser license-free and released the source code. That enabled 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 came in 2002, and after the Mozilla Foundation launched in 2003, Firefox 1.0 came out a year later. AOL finally pulled the plug on Netscape Navigator in 2007.
Looking for something new
Google was founded in 1998, and while it devoted its early years to search, it developed a browser in 2008 with some Mozilla employees. Google Chrome was rolled out slowly in the first year, with about 1% of the market, but now has the largest share, with about 64% of internet users.
Doesn’t fall far from the tree
Of course, a look into the history of web browsers wouldn’t be complete without that other great OS maker, Apple. In 2003 the company released Safari for Macs. While it gave Mac users something of its own, the browser really came into its own in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone, when it went mobile. Safari has a total of a quarter of the mobile browser market.
Modern times
Thirty years later, it is a relatively quiet time in browser history. At Microsoft, IE gave way to 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 for eyeballs, but the five major browsers are relatively quiet for now.