First published January 2005 in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers.

The application that enables web pages to be viewed and used to process and send information is the web browser. Not only does the browser colour our perception of the web, but as more and more applications are written for use with browsers, it has begun to take over the desktop. For better or for worse, for several years Microsoft Internet Explorer has dominated the browser market with around a 96 per cent share at its peak. But finally that is set to change.

Initially the web was a text or graphic experience: both could not be displayed on the same page. Then, in April 1993, Marc Andreessen of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released a browser called Mosaic that sparked a tremendous rise in the popularity of the web among novice users. He went on to found Mosaic Communications Corporation (later Netscape Communications, now part of AOL) and the exponential growth of the internet is primarily attributed to the emergence of Mosaic and its offspring Netscape Navigator which was released at the end of 1994. From 1994 to 1998 Netscape Navigator remained the market leading browser with approximately 90 per cent market share at its peak.

The licensing terms for NCSA Mosaic were generous for a proprietary software program. For all versions, non-commercial use was generally free (with certain limitations). In addition, the X Window System/Unix version publicly provided source code. However, despite persistent rumours to the contrary, Mosaic was never released as open source software during its brief reign as a major browser; there were always constraints on permissible uses without payment.

Back in Seattle, Microsoft saw Netscape’s success as a clear threat to the monopoly status of its Windows operating system and began a robust campaign to establish control over the browser market. Controlling a large share of the browser market, it reasoned, would lead to control over internet standards, and that in turn would provide the opportunity to sell software and services. Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code and turned it into Internet Explorer(IE).

The resulting battle between the two companies became known as the Browser Wars. Versions 1 and 2 of IE were markedly inferior to the then current versions of Netscape Navigator; IE 3 (1996) began to catch up; IE 4 (1997) was the first version that appeared to have Netscape beaten; and IE 5 (1998), with many bug fixes and stability improvements, saw Navigator’s market share dip below IE for the first time. By the end of the decade Netscape had unquestionably lost its former dominance on the Windows platform. Microsoft had emerged victorious in the browser wars and Netscape was acquired in 1999 by AOL.

In March 1998, realising that the browser market was lost and hoping that a non-Microsoft web browser might gain some attention in the open source community, Netscape put its browser under an open source licence, dubbing the project Mozilla.

On the Windows platform, Netscape was for long irrelevant. A small number of users continued to use Netscape, unwilling or unable to switch from the outdated and crash-prone earlier versions, since the newer browsers generally require more powerful machines for decent performance. On other platforms such as Linux which do not have IE bundled, Netscape remained the dominant browser for much longer.

Only in the last year or two has the rise of alternatives to IE given it strong competition. Mozilla Firefox (originally known as Phoenix and briefly as Mozilla Firebird) is a free cross-platform web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and hundreds of volunteers. Before its version 1 release on 9 November 2004, Firefox had already garnered a great deal of acclaim in the media. With over 5 million downloads in the first 12 days of its release and 7.5 million by the end of November 2004, Firefox 1.0 is one of the most-used, free, open source applications among home users. Firefox is currently grabbing 1 per cent market share from IE each month (with the relative shares standing at 91.5 to 4.2 per cent at the end of November 2004) and is targeted to gain around 10 per cent of the market by the end of 2005, creating a state of competition that many have heralded as the return of the browser wars.

Among Firefox’s popular features are an integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, and an extension mechanism for adding functionality. Although these features have already been available for some time in other browsers such as the Mozilla Suite and Opera, Firefox is the first of these browsers to have achieved large-scale adoption. It has attracted attention, in particular, as an alternative to IE since Explorer has come under fire for its alleged insecurity – detractors cite its disregard for web standards, use of the often-dangerous ActiveX component, and vulnerability to spyware and malware installation, and its lack of many features that Firefox’s proponents consider essential. Microsoft, for its part, has responded that it doesn’t feel issues with either security or features are a major concern!

But Mozilla Firefox is not the only new kid on the block. In August 2004 AOL breathed new life into Netscape with the release of Netscape 7.2, based on Mozilla 1.7, and on 30 November 2004 released a preview version of a new browser based on Firefox but also supporting IE. Since IE has been so dominant, many websites have been designed specifically to work with IE and may not work correctly in browsers using other engines, including the Gecko engine in Firefox. While current Firefox users can switch to IE if they have a problem with a website, AOL has found a different solution: if a site doesn’t work in the standard Firefox-based configuration in Netscape, it takes two clicks to display the page using the IE engine that is part of Windows.

Finally, rumours have been circulating that Google plans to develop a web browser, largely on the basis that it has registered the domain gbrowser.com. Google denies this but does not comment further.

Acknowledgment

Portions of this article are derived from the following articles in the Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(browser)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox

The text contained in Wikipedia is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation Licence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights