Where I grow up and remember about computer with internet was Window 95 and Internet Explorer browser. I was age 6 and first time ever see a computer, my family was not really technology type of people. Although we were using Dial-up connection back in the days, it was slow compare now. But it was like a whole new world to me. How amazing it can be to access a lot of information, sending e-mail or even go visit different country’s website. Just like traveling to different place without leaving the room. At first the only web browser I ever know was IE but later on I found out more different browsers from the internet such as Firefox and Navigator. I get to know about Chrome was later on in college.
After a little research about those browser. There are like a war between browsers, it help web development improve so much in very short of time. As mentioned, browser wars have been happening since Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator went up against each other to be best in class browser of the 90’s. Netscape had previously been leading the market, but with the release of Internet Explorer 3, Microsoft took the lead. Since it was automatically included in the Windows OS, it became the standard for many desktop users. IE once reach to over 80% users in 2000. This made Microsoft the winner in the infamous ‘first browser war’ against Netscape.
The same situation happened when Safari came to be in 2003. Where as Mac users were previously on IE or Navigator, Safari being pre-installed in Apple’s OS mean that it gained control of that desktop market.
After some time of IE beating out Navigator, Netscape made the code for the browser open source and gave it to Mozilla. However, when Firefox was introduced in 2004, it saw a rapid rise in popularity for a few years. That is until Google Chrome was released in 2008 and quickly fought to be the favored browser, which we still see today.
Of course, in between, we’ve also seen increased mobile use and differences in mobile browsers as well as the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3. This all contributes to the browser wars between Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and, recently, Edge to be the preferred browser for surfing the World Wide Web.
That competition comes in the form of frequent browser updates and version releases that you may notice today as each browser tries to one-up the other in speed, security, features, and design. For developers, many will try to program in a popular browser or a browser with a standard rendering engine so that the page is cross-compatible. For example, most people avoid developing in Internet Explorer since it’s known to be so problematic.
Today, IE will be end pretty soon due to not as cross-compatible and have many functional issues. Chrome is one of the most popular desktop browsers and Safari also share great market in the mobile browser. The war is still going on and pushing the web develop applications going forward.
