Internet Fax Glossary: History of Web Browser

A NeXTcube was used by Tim Berners-Lee (who pioneered the use of hypertext for sharing information) as the world's first Web server, and also to write the first Web browser, WorldWideWeb in 1990. Berners-Lee introduced it to colleagues at CERN in March 1991. Since then the development of Web browsers has been inseparably intertwined with the development of the Web itself.

The first browser, Silversmith, was created by John Bottoms in 1987. The browser, based on SGML tags, used a tag set from the Electronic Document Project of the AAP with minor modifications and was sold to a number of early adopters. At the time SGML was used exclusively for the formatting of printed documents. The use of SGML for electronically displayed documents signaled a shift in electronic publishing and was met with considerable resistance. Silversmith included an integrated indexer, full text searches, hypertext links between images text and sound using SGML tags and a return stack for use with hypertext links. It included features that are still not available in today's browsers. These include capabilities such as the ability to restrict searches within document structures, searches on indexed documents using wild cards and the ability to search on tag attribute values and attribute names.

In 1992, Tony Johnson releases the MidasWWW browser. Based on Motif/X, MidasWWW allows viewing of PostScript files on the Web from Unix and VMS, and even handles compressed PostScript.

Another early popular Web browser was ViolaWWW, which was modeled after HyperCard. However, the explosion in popularity of the Web was triggered by NCSA Mosaic which was a graphical browser running originally on Unix but soon ported to the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1.0 was released in September 1993, and was dubbed the killer application of the Internet. Marc Andreessen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quit to form a company that would later be known as Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape released its flagship Navigator product in October 1994, and it took off the next year.

Microsoft, which had thus far not marketed a browser (in fact even as late as 1995 Bill Gates dismissed personal use of the World Wide Web as a passing fad), finally entered the fray with its Internet Explorer product, purchased from Spyglass, Inc. This began what is known as the browser wars, the fight for the Web browser market between Microsoft and Netscape.

The wars put the Web in the hands of millions of ordinary PC users, but showed how commercialization of the Web could stymie standards efforts. Both Microsoft and Netscape liberally incorporated proprietary extensions to HTML in their products, and tried to gain an edge by product differentiation, leading to the acceptance of the Microsoft proposed Cascading Style Sheets over Netscape's JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS) by W3C.

In 1996, Netscape's share of the browser market reached 86% (with Internet Exporer edging up 10%); but then Microsoft began integrating its browser with its operating system and bundling deals with OEMs;, and within two years the trend had reversed. Although Microsoft has since faced antitrust litigation on these charges, the browser wars effectively ended once it was clear that Netscape's declining market share trend was irreversible.

In the second half of 2004 Internet Explorer had reached a peak market share of more than 92%. Ever since then, its market share had been slowly but steadily declining to less than 79% (as of May 2007).

Unable to continue commercially funding the product's development, Netscape responded by open sourcing its product, creating Mozilla. This helped the browser maintain its technical edge over Internet Explorer, but did nothing to slow Netscape's declining market share. The company was purchased by America Online in late 1998. At first, the Mozilla project struggled to attract developers, but by 2002 it had evolved into a relatively stable and powerful internet suite. Mozilla 1.0 was released to mark this milestone. Also in 2002, a spin off project that would eventually become the popular Mozilla Firefox was released. In 2004, Firefox 1.0 was released; Firefox 1.5 was released in November 2005. Firefox 2, a major update, was released in October 2006 and work has already begun on Firefox 3 which is scheduled for release in 2007. As of 2006, Mozilla and its derivatives account for approximately 12% of Web traffic.

Opera, an innovative, speedy browser popular in handheld devices, particularly mobile phones, as well as on PCs in some countries was released in 1996 and remains a niche player in the PC Web browser market. It is available on Nintendo's DS, DS Lite and Wii consoles. The Opera Mini browser uses the Presto layout engine like all versions of Opera, but runs on most phones supporting Java Midlets.

The Lynx browser remains popular for Unix shell users and with vision impaired users due to its entirely text-based nature. There are also several text-mode browsers with advanced features, such as w3m, Links (which can operate both in text and graphical mode), and the Links forks such as ELinks.

Prior to the release of Mac OS X, Internet Explorer and Netscape were also the primary browsers in use on the Macintosh platform. However, Apple's Safari, the default browser on OS X from version 10.3 onwards, has since grown to dominate this market. Browsers such as Firefox and Camino are also popular amongst Mac users.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would no longer be made available as a separate product but would be part of the evolution of its Windows platform, and that no more releases for the Macintosh would be made. However, in early 2005, Microsoft changed its plans, announcing that version 7 of Internet Explorer was under development. IE 7 was released for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista in October 2006.

Mozilla.