Web Browser War

Posted March 1, 2022

In 1993 the internet was about 4 years old since its invention, however it was only known to the world of scientists and nerds. Previously separate networks were now connected, but needed a way for users to navigate them.

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, designed and built the first web browser in 1990. Despite its creation, the Mosaic web browser was what helped people understand the possibilities offered by the internet.

Mosaic creator Marc Andreessen wrote the web browser while at NSCA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois. A few months after it finished, it was available through the Internet and within a year it had 2 million downloads from its users!

A year later, the creator of Mosaic and James H. Clark founded Mosaic Communications Corporation in April 1994. Within a few months, the two partners thought they had the goose with the golden eggs. Their good fortune was ruined by the University of Illinois as it claimed the rights to Mosaic after Andreessen designed it while still in the NSCA. At the end of the same year, Mosaic was renamed Netscape and the company Netscape Communicaitons Corporation. The company’s success continued despite the web browser copyright dispute, and it was not long before Navigator 1.0, an improved version of Netscape, was released.

However, competitors did not take long to build their own web browsers. Internet Explorer 3.0 was released in 1996 and was the beginning of the downfall of Netscape Navigator. The company continued to work on Navigator, while in 1998 it decided to publish the source code of the program. This decision led to the formation of Mozilla which later became Firefox and marked the beginning of the end for Netscape.

Microsoft had won the majority with its own program, spending hundreds of millions a year improving it.

In August 2002, Netscape 7 was released and a decision period was launched to extend the life of Netscape. Three years later, AOL acquired Netscape, which sought to restructure the browser and promote it again. However, their efforts were in vain and 4 months later, in March 2008, the internet browser was interrupted.

Which web browser are you using;

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