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1 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, shaky Web standards compliance, 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 SheetsCascading Style Sheets CSS is a computer language used to describe the presentation of a structured document written in HTML, XHTML or XML. The CSS specification is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Overview CSS is used by both authors an implementation.

In October 19971997 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year of the Reef''. Events January January 3 NBC's Today Show Bryant Gumbel signs off for the last time January 8 Mister Rogers receives a star on t, 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 a nearly 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 that 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 MicrosystemsSun Microsystems is a Silicon Valley-based computer, semiconductor and software manufacturer. Sun's products include computer servers and workstations based on the SPARC processor, the SunOS and Solaris operating systems, the NFS network file system, the servers, but the gradual result was to make Windows NT more popular as a server for InternetThis article is about the Internet the extensive, worldwide computer network available to the public. An internet is a more general term for a set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking''. WWW information network structu and intranetAn intranet is a network used internally in an organization that is sometimes access restricted. Typically the term refers to the internal web site. The same concepts and technologies of the world wide web such as web browsers and servers running on the i 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, FrontPageMicrosoft FrontPage is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and web site administration tool from Microsoft for the Windows operating system. It is part of Microsoft Office and included in some versions of the popular bundle. FrontPage was initially created by the Cambr, 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).