The Browser Wars: Netscape, Internet Explorer and Beyond

A web browser is the window through which almost everyone sees the web. Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox all do the same basic job: they fetch a page from a server and turn its code into the text, images and buttons you see on screen. Because browsers sit between every website and every visitor, the companies that make them have enormous influence over what websites can do.

That influence has been fought over more than once. The period known as the "browser wars" saw companies race to win users, sometimes by inventing features that only worked in their own browser. The results shaped how websites were built for years, and the lessons still explain why web designers care so much about standards and testing.

Netscape Takes the Lead

The first browser to reach a mass audience was NCSA Mosaic, released in 1993. Its success caught the attention of Silicon Valley. On April 4, 1994, Marc Andreessen, who had worked on Mosaic, and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, started a company called Mosaic Communications. A dispute with the University of Illinois's NCSA, which owned Mosaic, led to a name change, and the company became Netscape Communications.

Its browser, Netscape Navigator, arrived in late 1994. The Computer History Museum describes it as a complete rewrite of Mosaic that was faster and more reliable. Individuals could download it for free, while businesses paid for licenses. Netscape quickly became the browser most people used, and its 1995 stock market debut is widely seen as a starting gun for the dot-com boom.

Microsoft Joins the Fight

Microsoft had been slow to embrace the web, but that changed in 1995. In a memo that year, Bill Gates wrote, "I assign the Internet the highest level of importance," and the company set out to compete directly with Netscape. Internet Explorer 1.0 appeared in August 1995, built on a licensed version of Mosaic and offered alongside the new Windows 95.

Microsoft's biggest advantage was distribution. Internet Explorer came free with Windows, which ran on most of the world's personal computers, so users did not have to go looking for it. The Computer History Museum notes that Internet Explorer had overtaken Netscape by around 1998.

The First Browser War and Its Side Effects

As the two companies competed, each kept adding new features to win over web designers and users. Some were genuinely useful. Others were proprietary, meaning they worked in one company's browser but not the other. Netscape's blinking text and Internet Explorer's scrolling "marquee" text are two often-cited examples.

For people building websites, this was a headache. Pages could look fine in one browser and broken in the other, so developers often wrote extra code to detect the visitor's browser and serve different versions. Some sites simply displayed a note saying they were best viewed in a particular browser. In 1998, a group of web designers and developers formed the Web Standards Project to press browser makers to support the open standards published by the W3C instead.

The competition also reached the courts. On May 18, 1998, the US Department of Justice and a group of states sued Microsoft, and how it bundled Internet Explorer with Windows was central to the case. The case ran for years, and a court entered a final judgment in November 2002.

Netscape's Last Move: Open Source

Losing ground, Netscape made an unusual decision in 1998: it released the source code of its browser suite to the public. This created the Mozilla project, a community of volunteers and companies working on the code together. Late that year, America Online (AOL) announced it would buy Netscape.

By 2002, according to Mozilla, well over 90 percent of internet users were browsing with Internet Explorer. With little real competition, the pace of browser innovation slowed, and many websites were built mainly for Internet Explorer and its quirks.

The Second Browser War: Firefox, Safari and Chrome

The calm did not last. Members of the Mozilla community released a lean browser in 2002 that was later renamed Firefox, and Firefox 1.0 followed in 2004. Mozilla says it was downloaded more than 100 million times in less than a year. Features like tabbed browsing and built-in pop-up blocking helped win people over.

Apple had already unveiled its own browser, Safari, on January 7, 2003, promising speed and built-in Google search. Then on September 2, 2008, Google released a beta of Chrome in more than 100 countries, saying the web had evolved from simple text pages into rich, interactive applications and that the browser needed rethinking. Chrome gained users quickly. According to the analytics firm StatCounter, Chrome passed Internet Explorer worldwide for the first full calendar month in May 2012, although other measurement firms reported different figures at the time.

This second round of competition was healthier for the web. Browser makers began working together on shared standards. In 2004, people from Apple, Mozilla and Opera founded the WHATWG, a group that went on to develop the modern HTML standard.

A Short Timeline

• 1993: NCSA releases Mosaic.
• April 1994: Mosaic Communications, later Netscape, is founded.
• Late 1994: Netscape Navigator is released.
• August 1995: Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 1.0.
• 1998: Netscape releases its source code, creating the Mozilla project; the US government sues Microsoft.
• January 2003: Apple unveils Safari.
• 2004: Firefox 1.0 is released; the WHATWG is formed.
• September 2008: Google releases Chrome.
• June 2022: Internet Explorer is retired.

How It Turned Out, and What It Means for Your Website

Microsoft eventually changed course. In 2020 it released a new version of its Edge browser built on Chromium, the open-source project behind Chrome. On June 15, 2022, Microsoft officially retired Internet Explorer after more than 25 years.

Today, most browsers share just a few underlying engines, and they follow the same published standards far more closely than in the 1990s. With so many browsers now built on the same engine, independent browsers and open standards groups remain an important check on any single company's influence over the web.

The browser wars left a lasting lesson: build for standards, not for a single browser. A modern website should work well in all major browsers, on desktop and mobile, without "best viewed in" warnings. If your current site still contains code written for old versions of Internet Explorer, or relies on plugins that browsers no longer support, that is a sign it may be time for a redesign.

It also helps to test a new site in several browsers before it launches. Even with shared standards, small differences in how browsers display fonts, forms and layouts can still surprise you.

Key takeaways

• Netscape Navigator led the early web, but Microsoft's Internet Explorer, bundled free with Windows, had overtaken it by around 1998.
• Proprietary features in the first browser war forced developers to build for specific browsers, which pushed the industry toward open standards.
• Firefox, Safari and Chrome revived competition in the 2000s and helped make browsers faster and more standards-friendly.
• Microsoft retired Internet Explorer on June 15, 2022; today's websites should be built to standards and tested in every major browser.

Sources

• Computer History Museum, Browser Wars
• Computer History Museum, This Day in History: April 4
• Mozilla, History of the Mozilla Project
• Apple, Apple Unveils Safari (press release, 2003)
• Google, A fresh take on the browser (2008)
• StatCounter, Chrome overtakes IE globally for first calendar month (2012)
• US Department of Justice, U.S. v. Microsoft Corporation
• Microsoft, Internet Explorer 11 has retired (2022)