You are probably reading this story in a browser. You can take how you access the web for granted, or you can get into passionate vs. Safari arguments. Chrome. Anyway, the interface now been with us for 30 years, and his life was not without controversy.
There are five browsers widely used at the moment (Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Opera) and they have emerged from a long and contentious war. But in the beginning, there was only one. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, who envisioned a public way of accessing the internet, which he also played an important role in building.
A NeXT computer and a view
When the Internet was confined to a small group of people, Berners-Lee, who worked at CERN, sat at a NeXT computer, created a browser and called it WorldWideWeb. In order not to confuse it with the information for which the portal was, it was later renamed Nexus.
When it came time for a browser to make its public debut, the Nexus presented a problem: it could only be used on NeXT computers. Therefore, the browser was rewritten by several colleagues at CERN Berners-Lee, with most of the information coming from intern Nicola Pellow, to work on a wide range of computers. The browser came to be known as Line Mode Browser due to the line-by-line text entry method it used. It was available for the first time at CERN and then was introduced to the newsgroup Alt.hypertext Usenet.
Putting the pieces together
The Line Mode Browser could only handle text and where would the web be if it were just that? Type 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.
Although Mosaic was not open source, it was free for non-commercial use. How PC Magazine wrote in 1994, “Mosaic probably did more to popularize the Internet than any other software”, thanks to its “elegant combination of smart design and solid code”. It competed with Cello, from the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, but in 1994 Mosaic was “becoming the most widespread Internet browser,” we wrote, pointing to its dominance of the Unix Internet world.
But, although Mosaic was supported and 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 started a company they (eventually) called Netscape.
Marc Andreessen in 1998 (photo by Bromberger Hoover Photo / Getty Images)
Netscape was the beginning of the branded browser, but the company was originally called Mosaic Communications and its first product was Mosaic Netscape 0.9. A lawsuit settlement with the NCSA resulted in a change in the company’s name and browser.
Netscape Navigator took over the market almost immediately and continued to dominate it for most of the 1990s, reaching 90% in 1995, according to Visual Capitalist.
Browser wars
Meanwhile, Microsoft realized that it had a big advantage when it came to browsers, since most of the world was using machines that ran on the Windows operating system. In 1995, Microsoft bundled a browser called Internet Explorer with Microsoft Plus for Windows 95.
Windows 95 launched in 1995 (photo credit: TORSTEN BLACKWOOD / AFP via Getty Images)
It didn’t take long for Internet Explorer (IE) to win over the majority of Internet users, but it attracted the attention of the United States government, which filed antitrust charges against Microsoft for its practice of preventing computer manufacturers from uninstalling IE and installing other browsers. The case was finally solved in 2001, but IE had another three years as a prominent browser, reaching 95% of the market in 2003.
A competitor
In the late 1990s, Netscape was limping. It was acquired by AOL in 1998, several months after Netscape made its browser free to license and released its source code. This allowed the creation of the Mozilla project, which initially focused on the innovation of the Netscape browser, but later branched out on its own. Mozilla 1.0 arrived in 2002 and, after the release of the Mozilla Foundation in 2003, Firefox 1.0 arrived a year later. AOL finally shut down Netscape Navigator in 2007.
Looking for something new
Google was founded in 1998 and, although it dedicated its first years to research, in 2008 it developed a browser with some hires from Mozilla. Google Chrome had a slow launch in its first year, with about 1% of the market, but now has the largest share, with about 64% of internet users.
Don’t fall far from the tree
Of course, a look at the history of web browsers would not be complete without this other major operating system maker, Apple. In 2003, the company launched Safari for Macs. Although it gave Mac users something proprietary, the browser really stood out in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone, when it went mobile. Safari holds a quarter of the overall mobile browser market.
Modern times
Thirty years later, it is a relatively quiet time in the history of browsers. 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. Applications compete with browsers for eyes, but the top five browsers exist in relative peace, for now.