A Brief History of the Browser Wars

Though Google unveiled its first-ever web browser, Chrome, with a 38-page comic book, the news rang out like a battle cry. In launching its latest product, Google also re-launched a conflict that has raged almost since the Internet itself began. Though it seems odd to use words like "battle" and "conflict" to describe browser software, tech companies have employed violent rhetoric since the early days of the dot-com boom. "You have to run on Internet time or die," Netscape executive Jim Barksdale famously quipped.

Before browsers came along (back when the phrase "so-called" was put in front of terms like electronic mail and Information Superhighway), users had to tediously type IP addresses and complicated commands to retrieve data from the "network of networks" known as the Internet. In 1990, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first-ever web browser, WorldWideWeb, a name he later changed to "Nexus" to avoid confusion with the abstract meaning of the phrase. Describing his creation, Berners-Lee said the Web is to the Internet what the mind is to the brain: "Explore the Internet and you find cables and computers," he told the New York Times in 1993. "Explore the Web and you find information." Developers of the first commercial browser, Spry, called their $100 product "Internet-in-a-Box."

That same year, students and researchers at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Champaign introduced the first widely known browser, Mosaic. The timing was perfect. Over the next 12 months, the number of Websites would grow twenty-fold; demand for software to navigate these sites soared. By 1994, more than 2 million copies of Mosaic had been downloaded. Two features contributed to the browser's popularity: its ability to integrate images with text and its simple button-based interface. But Mosaic's supremacy would be short-lived. In 1994, one of its creators, Marc Andreessen, joined forces with Silicon Valley mogul Jim Clark to create a company that would "kill" Mosaic; Oddly enough, they named the start-up Mosaic Communications Corporation. It later became known as Netscape.

Netscape's first browser, Navigator 1.0, cost $39 (it was free for academic and non-profit use) and downloaded pages much faster than its predecessors, using encryption technology and HTML extensions to deliver more secure and engaging Web pages. From the beginning, Netscape adopted an open-source policy that encouraged users and competitors to improve the code they had written. (The company would later dedicate a team of people to promote this open-source work, known as the Mozilla project — an initiative whose name, reportedly, came from a combination of the terms "Mosaic-killer" and Godzilla.) Within two months of its release, Navigator controlled 60% of the booming browser market. By 1995, more than 10 million people were using it.

Cue William H. Gates III. On May 26, 1995, the Microsoft CEO better known as Bill sent an internal memo to executives titled "Internet Tidal Wave". Though Microsoft dominated the market for desktop applications with its suite of Office programs, Gates believed that the company had failed to grasp how important the Internet would be. From that point on, he wrote, online products must be given "the highest level of importance." A flurry of launches followed: an online service called MSN (to compete with AOL), a joint venture with NBC to create a 24/7 cable news station, MSNBC, and, of course, a new Web browser dubbed Internet Explorer, launched in August 1995. Microsoft made a key strategic move in its marketing of Explorer; the browser came bundled with Microsoft's Windows 95 — the de facto global standard for computer operating systems — making it essentially free. With nearly 45 million copies of Windows 95 sold in 1996 alone, the battlefield began to shift.

Microsoft had also made deals with more than 2,000 Internet service providers (including AOL) to ensure that Internet Explorer became those ISPs' default browser. By the time Microsoft unveiled Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996, Netscape had contacted the Department of Justice alleging that Microsoft's business practices — particularly its bundling of Explorer with Windows — were violating anti-trust laws. The ensuing legal battle between Microsoft and the Justice Department at times threatened to break the computer giant into several parts, as had happened with U.S. voice carrier Bell Telephone in the 1980s. In 2001 they settled the suit, with Microsoft agreeing to release a portion of its software code to competitors. Still, the damage had been done. By 1997, Netscape's share of the browser market had dropped to 50%.

The browser feud, meanwhile, had alienated customers of both companies. Because Netscape and Microsoft continually rushed versions to the market, new features were often inadequately debugged. In 1998, more than 17 million PC users had email accounts that were vulnerable to the Trojan Horse, malicious software (malware) that could surreptitiously steal a user's passwords and personal information.

Though AOL bought Netscape in 1998 for $4.2 billion, the company wasn't quite done being a thorn in Microsoft's side. Several members of the original Netscape team continued their work with the Mozilla project and would go on to launch Firefox in 2004, another open-source browser partially funded by Microsoft's latest archnemesis, Google. Firefox became the first to popularize tabbed browsing and integrated software to block pop-up advertising, creating an impressive fan base. In June, Mozilla enjoyed a record-setting debut of Firefox 3, which saw more than 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours. The browser currently has 13% of the market with 120 million users.

But 4 years later, Internet Explorer remains the dominant player, enjoying a 72% of the market share — a tempting target for Google, which has picked up much of Microsoft's industry momentum (and omnivorous reputation) in recent years. But with Firefox caught between Microsoft and Google, some analysts wonder if it won't be the first casualty in the latest skirmish of the browser war. For its part, Google continues to cast itself as the benevolent giant, renewing its deal to subsidize Mozilla until 2011 and offering an open-source policy for its code. "We would love Microsoft to open-source their browser, but it's unlikely that they would do so in my lifetime, my children's lifetime or my grandchildren's lifetime," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told The Financial Times, saying the creation of Chrome was more a defensive than offensive stratagem. "Microsoft has a history of favoring its own applications and I can give you 500,000 pages of court testimony, document web blogs and so forth and so on about that," Schmidt told. Looks like the browser wars will continue to be personal.