Interesting facts about browsers

Everyone knows that a browser is an application that allows you to browse the web on the Internet, and much more as additional functions. And this program was born almost simultaneously with the Internet, that is, in the early 1990s.

The first common GUI browser was NCSA Mosaic. One of the first browsers was open source, and some other browsers (Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer) have taken it as their basis. This browser had its drawbacks, but almost all of them were fixed in the Netscape Navigator browser. Netscape has released Netscape Navigator for various operating systems (UNIX, Windows, Mac OS) and has achieved notable success, including commercial. This prompted Microsoft to release its Internet Explorer browser, and in order to ruin the competition, they included their browser in Windows, making it part of the operating system. In addition, Microsoft added HTML extensions incompatible with the standards to its browser, and this can be considered the beginning of the browser war, which ended with the monopolization (more than 95%) of the market by the browser from Microsoft.

Due to the loss of the market, Netscape's revenues plummeted, and it was acquired by AOL, and the source code for the Netscape browser was released under the free MPL (Mozilla Public License). Subsequently, this browser was reborn into the Mozilla Firefox project.

The monopolization of the market by the IE browser had other consequences - Microsoft almost stopped developing the browser, and it barely changed from version 4 to version 6: it supported standards worse than other browsers, lagged behind in terms of usability and speed of work and page display. Recent versions of Internet Explorer are actively catching up.

In 1995, the Opera browser appeared. Initially, Opera was distributed as shareware, which probably explains its low popularity in most countries of the world and high popularity in the CIS countries. However, since 2005, Opera has also been distributed free of charge.

In 2008, Google wedged into the competition and released its browser - Chrome, based on the free project Chromium. Chrome browser contains some innovations (crash isolation, incognito mode, etc.)

In early 2009, Microsoft announced that it was developing a new browser called Gazelle. The new browser will apply resource sharing principles typical of multi-user operating systems, which, according to Microsoft, will increase its security.

And here is the statistics on the popularity of major browsers over the past year.