[ad_1]
You are probably reading this story on a browser. You can take the way you access the web for granted, or you can get into some heated arguments between Safari and Chrome. Anyway, the interface now has been with us for 30 years, and his life has not been without controversy.
There are currently five widely used browsers (Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera) and they came out of a long litigation war. But at first there was only one. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, who envisioned a public way to access the Internet, which he also played a huge role in building.
A NeXT computer and a vision
When the internet was confined to a small group of people, Berners-Lee, who worked at CERN, sat in front of a NeXT computer, wrote a browser, and called it WorldWideWeb. So as not to confuse it with the information it was the gateway to, it was later renamed to Nexus.
When it was time for a browser to make its public debut, Nexus had a problem – it could only be used on NeXT computers. The Navigator was therefore rewritten by several colleagues at Berners-Lee’s CERN, most of the contributions coming from intern Nicola Pellow, to work on a wider range of computers. The browser became known as a line-based browser because of the line-by-line text entry method it used. It was first available throughout CERN and then introduced on the alt.hypertext Usenet newsgroup.
Putting the pieces together
The online browser could only handle text and where would the web be if that was all that? Enter Mosaic, a browser capable of handling graphics and text, from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign.
Although Mosaic is not open source, it was free for non-commercial use. As PC Magazine wrote in 1994, “Mosaic has probably done more to popularize the Internet than any other software,” thanks to its “elegant combination of sleek design and strong code”. It was in competition with Cello from the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, but by 1994 Mosaic “became the most popular Internet browser,” we wrote, pointing to its dominance in the Internet Unix world.
But while Mosaic was supported and developed by the National Science Foundation until 1997, it had some competition from its own makers. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina left the NCSA in 1994 and founded a company they (eventually) called Netscape.
Marc Andreessen in 1998 (Photo by Bromberger Hoover Photo / Getty Images)
Netscape was the start of the branded browser, but the company was originally called Mosaic Communications, and its first product was Mosaic Netscape 0.9. A settlement of the lawsuit with the ANRC resulted in a name change for the company and the navigator.
Netscape Navigator took control of the market almost immediately and continued to dominate it through most of the 1990s, peaking at 90% in 1995, according to Visual Capitalist.
Navigator war
During this time, Microsoft realized that it has a huge advantage when it comes to browsers, as most countries around the world used machines running the Windows operating system. In 1995, Microsoft released a browser called Internet Explorer with Microsoft Plus for Windows 95.
Windows 95 launched in 1995 (Photo credit: TORSTEN BLACKWOOD / AFP via Getty Images)
It didn’t take long for Internet Explorer (IE) to convince most Internet users, but it caught the attention of the US government, which has filed antitrust charges against Microsoft for its practice of preventing manufacturers. from computers to uninstall IE and install other browsers. . The case was finally settled in 2001, but IE still had three years to be the quintessential browser ahead of it, peaking at 95% of the market in 2003.
A competitor
In the late 90s, Netscape was limping. It was acquired by AOL in 1998, several months after Netscape made its browser license free and released its source code. This enabled the creation of the Mozilla Project, which initially focused on innovation in the Netscape browser, but then branched out on its own. Mozilla 1.0 arrived in 2002, and following the launch of Mozilla Foundation in 2003, Firefox 1.0 arrived a year later. AOL finally unplugged Netscape Navigator in 2007.
Look for something new
Google was founded in 1998, and although it devoted its early years to research, in 2008 it developed a browser with a few hires from Mozilla. Google Chrome experienced a slow rollout in its first year, with around 1% of the market, but it now has the largest share, with around 64% of internet users.
Don’t fall far from the tree
Of course, a look at the history of web browsers wouldn’t be complete without that other major operating system maker, Apple. In 2003, the company released Safari for Mac. While it gave Mac users something proprietary, the browser really took off in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone, when it went mobile. Safari holds a quarter of the overall mobile browser market.
Modern times
Thirty years later, it is a relatively quiet period in the history of the browser. At Microsoft, IE has given way to Edge, which now runs Google’s Chromium engine, and there are a number of alternative browsers for those with specific needs. Apps compete with browsers for eyeballs, but the top five browsers exist in relative peace, for now.
[ad_2]
Source link