Browser wars: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The Browser Wars is the name given to the competition between web browsers for dominance in the marketplace. Specifically, it is most commonly used to refer to the struggle between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator for the dominance of the web browser market (in particular on the Microsoft Windows platform) during the late 1990s, as no other company's web browser ever attained a nontrivial share of the market.

History

By mid-1995, popular culture had begun to notice the World Wide Web. Netscape Navigator was the de facto standard for web browsing at that time; its competition consisted only of a few browsers such as Mosaic and Lynx which were being developed on university campuses. Microsoft saw the success of Netscape and recognized the potential of the web, and licensed Mosaic as the basis of Internet Explorer 1.0 which it released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus Pack in August 1995. Internet Explorer 2.0 was released three months later, and by then the race was on.

New versions of Netscape Navigator (later Netscape Communicator) and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years. Features often took priority over bug fixes, and therefore the browser wars were a time of unstable browsers, frequent crashes, security holes, and lots of user headaches. Internet Explorer only began to approach its competition with version 3.0 (1996), which offered scripting support and the market's first commercial cascading style sheets implementation.

In October 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found that giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached which read "From the IE team." The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dragon mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" (representing the market share). [1]

During these times it was common for web designers to display 'best viewed in Netscape' or 'best viewed in Internet Explorer' logos. These images often identified a specific browser version and were commonly linked to a source from which the "preferred" browser could be downloaded. To some extent, these logos were indicative of the divergence between the "standards" supported by the browsers and signified which browser was used for testing the pages. Supporters of the notion that web sites should be interoperable with any browser started the "viewable with any browser" campaign.

Microsoft had two strong advantages in the browser wars. One was simply an issue of resources: Netscape began with near-90% market share and a good deal of public goodwill, but as a relatively small company deriving the great bulk of its income from what was essentially a single product (Navigator and its derivatives), it was financially vulnerable. Netscape's total revenue never exceeded the interest income generated by Microsoft's cash on hand.

The other, more important, advantage was that Microsoft Windows had a monopoly in the operating system marketplace and could be used to leverage IE to a dominant position. IE was bundled with every copy of Windows; therefore, even though early versions of IE were markedly inferior to Netscape's browser, Microsoft was still able to grow its market share. And IE remained free while the enormous revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and marketing, resulting in rapid improvements until it was so similar to Netscape that users had no desire to download and install Netscape.

Other Microsoft actions also hurt Netscape, such as:

• Netscape's business model was to give away its browser but sell server software. Microsoft understood this and attacked Netscape's revenue sources, bundling Microsoft's Internet Information Server web server "free" with server versions of Windows, and offering Microsoft customers workalike clones of Netscape's proxy server, mail server, news server, and other software free or at steep discounts. This didn't have much effect at first, as much of Netscape's revenues came from customers using Sun Microsystems servers, but the gradual result was to make Windows NT more popular as a server for Internet and intranet while cutting off Netscape's income.
• Microsoft created licensing agreements with computer manufacturers requiring them to provide desktop icons for IE, while penalizing them for shipping Netscape on their computers.
• Microsoft made it very easy for small and medium ISPs to release branded versions of Internet Explorer, and with few exceptions they did, meaning that users of many ISPs were encouraged to use Internet Explorer and not Netscape.
• Microsoft created a licensing agreement with AOL to base AOL's primary interface on IE rather than Netscape.
• Microsoft purchased and released a web authoring tool, FrontPage, that tended to create pages that looked better in IE.
• Microsoft included support for CSS in IE and made IE more tolerant than Netscape of poorly-constructed HTML (such as generated by some web authoring tools). Some web designers found it easier to write their pages for IE only than to fix bad HTML or to support Netscape's LAYER extensions.

The effect of these actions were to "cut off Netscape's air supply," as stated by a Microsoft executive during the Microsoft antitrust case (which resulted in Microsoft being prosecuted for having used its monopoly status to manipulate the market). This, together with several bad business decisions on Netscape's part, led to Netscape's defeat by the end of 1998, after which the company was acquired by America Online for USD $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer became the new dominant browser, and has since attained 96% of the web browser market share, more than Netscape had at its peak.

The browser wars ended when Internet Explorer ceased to have any serious competition for its market share. This also brought an end to the rapid innovation in web browsers; there have been no new versions of Internet Explorer since version 6.0, released in 2001 (which itself was little different from version 5.5, as the main purpose of version 6.0 was to bundle it with Windows XP).

The browser wars encouraged two specific kinds of bad behavior among their combatants.

Features vs. bugs: A web browser had to have more new features than its competition, or else it would be considered to be "falling behind." But with a limited supply of manpower to put into development, this often meant that quality assurance suffered and that the software was released with serious bugs.

Obeying standards vs. making up new ones: A web browser was supposed to follow the standards set down by standards committees (for example, by adhering to the HTML specifications). But competition and innovation required that web browsers extend the standards (such as by adding VBSCRIPT or '<MARQUEE>' tags) without waiting for committee approval. New tags like these only work with the one browser which implemented them, and may render incorrectly with other browsers.

Web standards were weakened as an outcome of a single company's dominance over the browser market. Internet Explorer 6.0 lacks compliance with several standards such as Cascading Style Sheets, the PNG image format, and XHTML. This causes web development to stagnate with obsolete and unnecessarily complex techniques (such as the abuse of tables for page layouts, when style sheets would be better). Many web developers also write their web pages to work with Internet Explorer's idiosyncrasies rather than stick to the standards, and this means that many web pages only render properly with Internet Explorer.

In addition, Microsoft implemented several proprietary extensions to web technologies, rendering many web pages incompatible with other browsers and platforms (examples of this are VBScript and ActiveX extensions, as well as Microsoft's own DHTML techniques (which admittedly predate the official DOM standard, but nonetheless are still in use).

The almost-universal adoption of Internet Explorer has also been a factor in the success of many mass computer attacks by computer worms, which exploit software vulnerabilities to propagate themselves. The more machines exposing a given vulnerability, the more easily a worm will propagate.

Last, but not least, because Internet Explorer includes the word 'Internet' in its name, many inexperienced users are fooled into believing Internet Explorer is the Internet (the version of Internet Explorer bundled with Windows 95 was actually titled The Internet), thus making a browser change difficult to accept. In reality, this is a mistake as the Internet is an entire computer network and Internet Explorer is just one of many software clients for accessing a particular feature of the Internet (the HTTP protocol).

In 1998, Netscape developers open sourced Navigator, renaming it Mozilla. Mozilla was eventually rewritten from scratch and improved in many ways. In 2003, Mozilla reached version 1.0 and has become popular in the open source community. Many derivative products have been created, including Mozilla's own lightweight multiplatform browser known as Firefox. Mozilla and Mozilla-based browsers have established a growing niche in the browser market.

The Unix-based Konqueror browser is part of the KDE project and competes with Mozilla for marketshare on Unix-like systems. Konqueror's KHTML engine was also used by Apple for their Safari browser, which is now the default browser on the Macintosh.

Opera has a small desktop market share, but is a popular web browser on mobile devices such as smartphones.

In 2003 Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer version 6.0 SP1 will be the last standalone version of its browser and that future enhancements will be dependent on the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn. Longhorn will include new tools such as Avalon and XAML (a proprietary XML language) which will enable developers to build rich web applications.

As a response to this, in April 2004 the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software joined efforts [2] to develop new open technology standards which add more capability while remaining backwards-compatible with existing technologies. The result of this collaboration was WHATWG (Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group) [3], a working group devoted to the fast creation of new standard definitions which will then be submitted to the W3C for approval.

Some of the technology media have suggested that a second browser war is imminent, or even presently arising. Internet Explorer has repeatedly been the target of a large number of worms and viruses, as well as adware and spyware, prompting some users to switch to alternatives such as Safari and Mozilla Firefox. However, none of these currently pose any threat to Internet Explorer's dominance - its market share is currently estimated to be approximately 90%.