Browser wars

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The term "browser wars" is the name given to the competition for dominance in the web browser marketplace. The term is most commonly used to refer to two specific periods of time: the particularly intense struggle between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator during the late 1990s, and the growing threat which Mozilla Firefox poses to Internet Explorer from 2004 onward.

Statistics reference: Usage share of web browsers

Contents

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Early browser competition

In the early 1990s there were many simple graphic-oriented World Wide Web browsers available. The first which reached widespread popularity was Mosaic, developed at NCSA. Several companies licensed it to create their own commercial browsers, such as Spry Mosaic and Spyglass Mosaic.

One of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreesen founded the company Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mozilla. To resolve legal issues with NCSA, the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser improved on Mosaic's usability and reliability, and it soon dominated the market, helped by the fact that "evaluation copies" of the browser were downloadable without restrictions or cost.

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The first round of browser wars

By mid-1995, the World Wide Web gradually began receiving a great deal of attention in the popular culture and mass media. Netscape Navigator was the dominant and most widely used web browser at that time, while Microsoft had just licensed Mosaic as the basis of Internet Explorer 1.0 which it released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus! Pack in August 1995. Internet Explorer 2.0 was released three months later, and by then the race was on.

New versions of Netscape Navigator (later Netscape Communicator) and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years. Features often took priority over bug fixes, and therefore the browser wars were a time of unstable browsers, shaky Web standards compliance, frequent crashes, security holes, and lots of user headaches. Internet Explorer only began to approach par with its competition with version 3.0 (1996), which offered scripting support and the market's first commercial Cascading Style Sheets implementation.

In October 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found that giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached which read "From the IE team." The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dragon mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" (representing the market distribution). [1]

Internet Explorer 4 changed the tides of the browser wars. It was faster and it adopted the W3C's published specifications more faithfully than Netscape Navigator 4.0. Unlike Netscape, it provided the possibility for truly "dynamic" pages in which the flow of the text and images of the page could be altered after the page was loaded. Installing Internet Explorer 4.0 was considered as a system upgrade that would provide more capabilities such as MP3 playback and, optionally, the Windows Desktop Update.

During these times it was common for web designers to display 'best viewed in Netscape' or 'best viewed in Internet Explorer' logos. These images often identified a specific browser version and were commonly linked to a source from which the "preferred" browser could be downloaded. To some extent, these logos were indicative of the divergence between the "standards" supported by the browsers and signified which browser was used for testing the pages. Supporters of the notion that web sites should be interoperable with any browser started the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign.

A lot was at stake for these two companies involved in the browser wars. A popular web browser could earn a great deal of money: search engine companies would bid to be the default tool used in the web browser, and other companies with a web presence would bid to be listed in the default set of bookmarks which was preinstalled with the browser. Since a web browser is a powerful gateway to a great deal of information, the company which controlled this gateway could conceivably have a great deal of influence over its users.

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Internet Explorer dominance

Microsoft had two strong advantages in the browser wars. One was resources: Netscape began with a nearly 90% market share and a good deal of public goodwill, but as a relatively small company deriving the great bulk of its income from what was essentially a single product (Navigator and its derivatives), it was financially vulnerable. Netscape's total revenue never exceeded the interest income generated by Microsoft's cash on hand.

The other, more important, advantage was that Microsoft Windows had a monopoly in the operating system marketplace. IE was bundled with every copy of Windows; therefore, even though early versions of IE were markedly inferior to Netscape's browser, Microsoft was still able to enlarge its market share. And IE remained free while the enormous revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and marketing, resulting in rapid improvements until it was so similar to Netscape feature-wise that users had no desire to download and install Netscape.

Other Microsoft actions also hurt Netscape, such as:

  • Netscape's business model was to give away its browser but sell server software. Microsoft understood this and attacked Netscape's revenue sources, bundling Microsoft's Internet Information Server web server "free" with server versions of Windows, and offering Microsoft customers workalike clones of Netscape's proxy server, mail server, news server, and other software free or at steep discounts. This didn't have much effect at first, as much of Netscape's revenues came from customers using Sun Microsystems servers, but the gradual result was to make Windows NT more popular as a server for Internet and intranet while cutting off Netscape's income.
  • Microsoft created licensing agreements with computer manufacturers requiring them to provide desktop icons for IE, while penalizing them for shipping Netscape on their computers.
  • Microsoft made it very easy for small and medium ISPs to release branded versions of Internet Explorer, and with few exceptions they did, meaning that users of many ISPs were encouraged to use Internet Explorer and not Netscape.
  • Microsoft created a licensing agreement with AOL to base AOL's primary interface on IE rather than Netscape.
  • Microsoft purchased and released a web authoring tool, FrontPage, that tended to create pages that looked better in IE.
  • Microsoft included support for CSS in IE and made IE more tolerant than Netscape for poorly-constructed HTML (such as those generated by some WYSIWYG editors). Some web designers found it easier to write their pages for IE only than to fix bad HTML or to support Netscape's LAYER extensions.

The effect of these actions were to "cut off Netscape's air supply," as stated by a Microsoft executive during the United States v. Microsoft case (which resulted in Microsoft being prosecuted for having used its monopoly status to manipulate the market). This, together with several bad business decisions on Netscape's part, led to Netscape's defeat by the end of 1998, after which the company was acquired by America Online for USD $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer became the new dominant browser, attaining a peak of about 96% of the web browser usage share during 2002, more than Netscape had at its peak.

The browser wars ended when Internet Explorer ceased to have any serious competition for its market share. This also brought an end to the rapid innovation in web browsers; there have been no new versions of Internet Explorer since version 6.0, released in 2001 (which itself was little different from version 5.5, as the main purpose of version 6.0 was to bundle it with Windows XP).

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Consequences

The browser wars encouraged two specific kinds of behavior among their combatants.

  1. Adding new features instead of fixing bugs: A web browser had to have more new features than its competition, or else it would be considered to be "falling behind." But with limited manpower to put towards development, this often meant that quality assurance suffered and that the software was released with serious bugs.
  2. Adding proprietary features instead of obeying standards: A web browser was expected to follow the standards set down by standards committees (for example, by adhering to the HTML specifications). But competition and innovation required that web browsers extend the standards with proprietary features (such as by adding '<FONT>', '<MARQUEE>', or the infamous '<BLINK>' tags) without waiting for committee approval. New tags like these only rendered properly in the one browser which implemented them, and sometimes caused problems with other browsers.

Web standards were weakened as an outcome of a single company's dominance over the browser market. This causes web development to stagnate with obsolete and unnecessarily complex techniques (such as the abuse of tables for page layouts, when style sheets would be better). Many web developers also write their web pages to work with Internet Explorer's idiosyncrasies rather than stick to the standards, and this means that many web pages only render properly with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 6.0 still lacks compliance with several standards such as CSS, the PNG image format, and XHTML.

In addition, Microsoft implemented several proprietary extensions to web technologies, rendering many web pages incompatible with other browsers and platforms. Examples of this are the VBScript and ActiveX extensions, as well as Microsoft's own DHTML implementation.

The near-universal adoption of Internet Explorer has created a monoculture which has widened the damage done by computer worms, which exploit software vulnerabilities to propagate themselves. The more machines exposing a given vulnerability, the more easily a worm will propagate.

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The second round of browser wars

In 1998, Netscape publicly released the source code of Communicator under an open source license, calling the new product Mozilla. Mozilla was eventually rewritten from scratch and improved in many ways. In 2002, Mozilla reached version 1.0 and quickly became popular in the open source community. Many derivative products have been created, including Mozilla's own lightweight multiplatform browser known as Firefox, which reached its 1.0 release in 2004. Mozilla and Mozilla-based browsers have established a growing niche in the browser market.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer version 6.0 SP1 would be the last standalone version of its browser. Future enhancements would be dependent on Windows Vista, which will include new tools such as the Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML (a proprietary XML language) to enable developers to build extensive web applications. These can be roughly compared to Mozilla's cross-platform concept of XUL (XML User-interface Language).

As a response to this, in April 2004 the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software joined efforts to develop new open technology standards which add more capability while remaining backwards-compatible with existing technologies. The result of this collaboration was WHATWG, a working group devoted to the fast creation of new standard definitions which will then be submitted to the W3C for approval.

In June 2004, IE's security was notably publicly questioned after the Download.ject attack, in which an IE user could infect their computers with malware (a backdoor and key logger) merely by viewing a web page. Not only security companies but US CERT started recommending switching to Firefox for more secure browsing in the wake of this attack.

In August 2004, Windows XP SP2 was released. In February 2005, Microsoft announced that IE 7 (previously planned for the release of Windows Vista) will be available for Windows XP SP2 and later versions of Windows by mid-2005 [2]. The announcement introduces the new version of the browser as a major security enhancement over IE 6 SP2, as security has been a major focus of Microsoft in recent months. The announcement avoided mention of web standards, prompting concerns from web developers and other proponents of web standards. [3] Some believe that this decision to backport the new version of Internet Explorer to Windows XP is a move to counter the rapid growth of Mozilla Firefox.

By the last quarter of 2005, Internet Explorer's usage share dropped to around 85%, primarily due to competition from Mozilla Firefox. A major factor in this shift has been the prevalence of computer worms and viruses, as well as adware and spyware. Internet Explorer has been notoriously susceptible to these threats, and as alternative browsers become mature, they are giving users an option to switch. Other factors have been the increasing use of various distributions of the Linux operating system, many of which include Firefox as the default browser, the relative similarity in layout between the Firefox and Internet Explorer GUI designs (making the transition easier), and the lack of tabbed browsing as a feature in most Internet Explorer versions. Users who convert to using Firefox often choose not to revert to Internet Explorer due to the lack of tabbed browsing, and use Internet Explorer solely for accessing sites using proprietary features not supported by non-MS browsers, or for accessing Microsoft sites, many of which can only be accessed through Internet Explorer. However, it is now possible to use Internet Explorer only sites in Firefox (in Windows) using the Firefox extension IE Tab.

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Other browser competition

  • Microsoft Windows: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc.

Although it currently only has a small desktop usage share, Opera is the third most popular browser on Windows (it is also available on other platforms, including Linux and Mac OS). In September 2005, Opera removed the ad banner and licensing fee from their browser with the release of Opera 8.5. Their stated goal was to replace Firefox as the second most used web browser.

Other notable browsers for Windows are Netscape 8 (an Internet Explorer/Firefox hybrid), SeaMonkey (a replacement for the Mozilla Application Suite) and Maxthon (formerly MyIE2; it uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine but has numerous features such as tabbed browsing).

  • Linux and Unix: Firefox, Konqueror, Epiphany, Opera, etc.

The Unix-based Konqueror browser is part of the KDE project and is the primary competitor against Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox, Mozilla/SeaMonkey, Epiphany, Galeon, etc.) for market share on Unix-like systems.

Konqueror's KHTML engine is a very easy to use API for the entire KDE desktop, such that derivative browsers can be produced [4] or web-browsing functionality added to current applications (for example, amaroK has a Wikipedia sidebar that gives information about the current artist) with relative ease.

  • Mac OS: Firefox, Safari, Camino, Opera, etc.

KHTML was adopted by Apple for its Safari, and following KDE uses it as an API for the whole desktop. The browsers Shiira, and OmniWeb use this API named WebKit, and many Macintosh programs are adding web-browsing, which is as easy as in KDE [5].

Camino is a popular new Mozilla-based browser for the Mac OS X platform, and competes directly with Apple's Safari, using Mac's native Cocoa interface, instead of Mozilla's XUL which is used in Firefox.

  • Mobile Devices: Opera, NetFront, etc.

Opera is a popular web browser on mobile devices such as smartphones because of its small footprint. In February, 2006 it was announced [6] that Nintendo "will release an add-on card" with a version of Opera for the Nintendo DS.

Opera's primary competition on mobile devices appears to be from NetFront.

Windows Mobile comes with Pocket Internet Explorer by default and competes with Opera, Netfront and Mozilla's Minimo.

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External links

es:Guerra de navegadores fr:Guerre des navigateurs it:Guerra dei browser he:מלחמת הדפדפנים ja:ブラウザ戦争 pl:Wojna przeglądarek pt:Guerra dos browsers tr:Tarayıcı savaşları zh:浏览器大战

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