This page considers web browsers.

It covers -

• introduction - the technology and issues
• history - from the 'browser wars' to Firefox
• markets - how many browsers, market share and demographics
• studies - memoirs, industry analysis and technical works
• landmarks - key points in the evolution of the browser

It supplements the discussion of Networks & the Global Information Infrastructure, Accessibility, Design, Electronic Publishing, and Metadata & Search Engines.

     introduction

Web browsers - such as Internet Explorer, Safari and Mozilla Firefox - are software that enables a user to display and interact with 'web documents', including -

• items accessed on the internet (hosted on a web server)
• items accessed on an intranet
• physical format digital publications (eg on a CD-ROM, on a floppy disk or USB drive)
• items held on a personal computer.

They are thus not restricted to display of information that is on the web.

In essence a web browser does four things. It -

• 'fetches' web pages on the net using the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) or other protocols such as FTP and Gopher
• recognises particular code and files (eg HTML and XML code, GIF and JPEG image files)
• interprets that information for display onscreen (and through a printer) in a layout that is broadly what the author of that code intended
• offers additional functionality, notably allows the user to pass from one document to another via hyperlinks

A browser may be bundled with a search engine but in function they are separate entities.

Browsers interpret the code that underlies web pages and other resources. That interpretation - what you see on the screen - varies from browser to browser (and from type of personal computer or other device). It does not offer the verisimilitude of print, which is one reason for the use of PDF. Different browsers may not display a document fully or at all (eg some browsers are text-only).

Some browsers have greater functionality than others - early browsers were for example more restricted than recent generations. As part of commercial efforts to 'own the internet' (or merely the consumer desktop) some were 'optimised' for variants of code espoused by particular businesses, notably Microsoft's IE for code generated using its Frontpage editing tool.

It is noteworthy that there is no single 'official' browser: anyone is free to develop a new browser and let it contend in the market. Tim Berners-Lee's initial browser disappeared; the W3C browser Amaya has remained an academic exercise.

As the following paragraphs indicate, the past five years have been dominated by a browser monoculture, with Microsoft (through its hold on the desktop market in many nations) having the advantage that IE is the default browser for most people and indeed has often been mistaken for "the internet". Apart from sharp practice - and anticompetitive activity denounced by judges, government agencies and competitors - that monoculture is of concern because it fosters security vulnerabilities and at best blurs the global standards on which the web depends.

     studies

Much of the non-technical literature regarding browsers has centred on the battle between Microsoft and Netscape. Three useful points of entry are Competition, Innovation & the Microsoft Monopoly: Antitrust in the Digital Marketplace (Boston: Kluwer 1999) by Jeffrey Eisenach & Thomas Lenard, World War 3.0: Microsoft & Its Enemies (New York: Random 2000) by Ken Auletta and The Economics of The Microsoft Case (PDF) by Timothy Bresnahan.

Jim Clark's memoir Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Startup that took on Microsoft (New York: St Martins 1999) is an interesting picture but suffers from having Clark on both ends of the camera lens. Michael Lewis' The New New Thing (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1999) is a portrait of Clark, profiled in Wired 2.01 and 2.10 among others. Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape & How It Challenged Microsoft (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press 1998) by Joshua Quittner & Michelle Slatulla and Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape & Its Battle with Microsoft (New York: Free Press 1998) by Michael Cusmano & David Yoffie are less persuasive after Netscape tacitly conceded defeat. 

Views from Redmond include Paul Andrews' reverent How the Web was Won: Microsoft from Windows to the Web - The inside story of how Bill Gates and his band of Internet idealists transformed a Software Empire (New York: Broadway 1999), Overdrive: Bill Gates & the Race to Control Cyberspace (New York: Wiley 1998) by James Wallace and Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside (New York: Owl 1999) by Jennifer Edstrom & Marlin Eller. Charles Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars (New York: Times 1999) is an account by the developer of web-authoring software FrontPage.

There is a more in-depth study of Microsoft elsewhere on this site. A detailed profile of Time Warner, the conglomerate that gobbled up Netscape, appears in our Ketupa site.

Netscape's Marc Andreessen features in Robert Reid's upbeat Architects of the Web - 1,000 Days That Built The Future of Business (New York: Wiley 1997).

     landmarks

1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposes global hypertext space

1990 Berners-Lee develops WorldWideWeb browser to support what becomes the web

1993 NCSA Mosaic released

1993 Lynx released

1994 Netscape releases Navigator

1995 Microsoft licences Mosaic as basis for Internet Explorer (IE), released as Windows 95 Plus with default page set to MSN

1996 Opera released

1996 W3C releases Amaya

1997 Mosaic 3.0 released

1997 Netscape has est 72% of global market, IE has 18%

1998 America Online buys Netscape for US$4.2bn

1998 iCab releases iCab

1998 Netscape developers 'leak' source code as Mozilla

1999 Nestscape's global share at around 33%

2000 KDE releases Konqueror

2001 Netscape's share at 12%

2002 Mozilla Foundation releases Mozilla

2002 Netscape's global market share down to 3.9%, Microsoft's IE up 87%?

2004 IE peaks at est 95% of market

2004 release of Firefox

2004 Mozilla Foundation and Opera form Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group (WHATWG)




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