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Browser wars

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Pilaf~enwiki (talk | contribs) at 17:14, 24 February 2004 (It uses some info from other WP pages (Netscape Navigator, Web browser), so it has some (but not much) redundancy. I think it's a good summary overall.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Browser wars is the name given to the struggle led by Microsoft (with its browser, Internet Explorer) and Netscape for the dominance of the web browser market, in particular on the Windows platform.

The struggle began in 1995 with the inclusion of Internet Explorer as a main component of Microsoft's Windows 95 (by then the de facto standard in the desktop OS market), which drew users' attention away from Netscape Navigator. This action eventually lead to Microsoft's antitrust lawsuit, with focus on Microsft's use of its monopoly status to manipulate the market.

Microsoft's moves, in conjunction with Netscape's bad strategy, caused Netscape to be defeated by the end of 1998, being sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer became the new dominant browser, with over 90% of market share (even more than Netscape had at its best moment).

Consequences

Web standards were greatly damaged as an outcome to Microsoft's dominance over the browser market. Internet Explorer's latest version, IE6 (released in 2001), lacks compliance towards standards such as CSS, the PNG image format and XHTML (among others), causing the web development to stagnate with already obsolete and complex methods (such as the abuse of tables for page layouts).

In addition, Microsoft has implemented several propietary extensions to web technolgies, rendering many web pages incompatible with other browsers and platforms (examples of this are VBScript and ActiveX extensions). Although not in great extent, this has stopped many computer users from moving towards altarnative platforms, such as Linux.

Sequel

In 1998, Netscape developers open sourced Navigator, renaming it Mozilla. Mozilla was eventually re-written from scratch, making it better in many previously lacking areas. Mozilla became widely popular in the open source community.

In 2003, Mozilla reached version 1.0, making it farily stable and fully standards compliant. Many derivate projects where created, including Mozilla's own lightweight multiplatform browser known as Firefox. As a result, Mozilla and Mozilla-based browsers are slowly but steadily making their way in the browser market as Internet Explorer is considered an outdated and crippled product.

Other browsers have recently entered the browser wars. In particular Opera browser and the KHTML-based browsers (Konqueror in KDE and Safari on the Mac), both with good standards compliance and state-of-the-art features, have had significant growth in the last months, though the Internet Explorer dominance continues to be strong.

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