Browser war
A cut- throat competition between Microsoft and Netscape for the domination of their website viewing programs - so-called web browsers - on the Internet, which lasted from 1995 to 1998, is referred to as browser war , in which Microsoft was ultimately able to prevail with its Internet Explorer product against its rival Netscape Navigator . The development in the years from 2004, in which Mozilla Firefox and other alternative browsers were able to take market share from Internet Explorer again, is sometimes referred to as the "second browser war".
The beginnings of the WWW
In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was still based on the HTML 2.0 standard, which hardly allowed any formatting. During this time, the Netscape Navigator from Netscape Communications was the successor to the NCSA Mosaic, a new type of browser.
In addition to the previous, relatively simple websites, the program also allowed the integration of tables and significantly more colors. Later, frames , scripting features, layers, and multimedia elements added.
When the use of the World Wide Web became popular in 1995, the Netscape Navigator had a global market share of over 80 percent. With the free distribution of the Navigator, Netscape wanted to increase the demand for its own server products.
The first browser war
Microsoft's entry
Until 1995 Microsoft paid little attention to the new medium Internet. That changed when Bill Gates decided to invest heavily in the Internet and develop a product that competed with the Navigator. Microsoft feared that Netscape could become a serious competitor:
"Microsoft ran the risk of being made irrelevant as the technology advanced."
"Microsoft was in danger of becoming meaningless with technological advances."
Far more serious than the loss of technology leadership, if Netscape had actually become a serious competitor, the Netscape Communicator contained a number of programming interfaces (APIs) that developers could use to create standalone programs based on the Netscape base. In addition, the Java programming language was distributed by Sun Microsystems with Netscape, which contains many more such APIs. If a number of these applications were programmed - so Microsoft feared - the Netscape Communicator would prove to be so-called middleware , a kind of operating system attachment. However, since Netscape Navigator not only ran on the Microsoft Windows operating system, but was also offered for competing platforms, Microsoft's operating system monopoly for personal computers would be seriously jeopardized. Because then the operating system used would no longer be so important. Microsoft saw the only way to prevent this from being to reduce Netscape's market share by all means.
Internet Explorer
In August 1995 Microsoft published the first version of its Internet Explorer , which at that time still essentially consisted of code from NCSA Mosaic. When Microsoft introduced IE, Microsoft had two key strategic advantages over Netscape:
- Microsoft had far more financial resources than Netscape. According to reports by the US federal court, Microsoft invested more than 100 million US dollars annually in the development and marketing of Internet Explorer. While the original Internet Explorer team consisted of only five to six members in 1995, there were 100 a year later. In 1999, 1,000 employees (more than Netscape's total employees) worked on the development and marketing of the browser which is a considerable order of magnitude in view of a relatively small software project like the development of a browser.
- Microsoft could simply bundle its browser with its operating systems. With the additional integration of Internet Explorer in Windows, which was then installed on 95 percent of all newly sold PCs, Microsoft was able to quickly increase Internet Explorer's market share.
Neglect of standards
Since both browser manufacturers wanted to maintain and improve their position on the market, new extensions to the HTML standard were invented time and again, which gave the page authors new possibilities and were also accepted by many. The official standards of the W3C initially served as the lowest common denominator, but with the formatting language CSS , introduced by the W3C in 1996 , one began to interpret the standards in their own way and incompatible with the other or to offer parts of them only in a different syntax.
Netscape relied on the apparently unattainable market share and expanded its browser (at that time in version 4) with functions for online shopping or search aids that were questionable under data protection law, instead of fixing critical errors.
Microsoft prevails
From 1995 to 2003 the market share of the Netscape Navigator fell from over 80 percent to under four percent, while the market share of the Internet Explorer rose from under three percent to over 95 percent in the same period.
From January 1998 Netscape released the Navigator for free and published the browser's source code as open source . In the resulting Mozilla project , the program was completely rewritten.
In November 1998, AOL bought Netscape for $ 4.2 billion. After that, many of the navigator's developers were laid off, and in the meantime work has even been stopped entirely.
In February 2008 the official end of the Navigator finally came: AOL announced that it would stop its development and support from this point on.
Lawsuit against Microsoft
Microsoft's aggressive market behavior led to numerous lawsuits from competitors. By paying large sums of money, Microsoft usually managed to reach an out-of-court settlement with the other party. In the case of Netscape, that was $ 750 million.
In the course of a lawsuit, both Bill Gates and numerous witnesses named by Microsoft repeatedly alleged that Internet Explorer could not be disconnected from the operating system, which turned out to be a false statement.
The second browser war
Consequences of the high market share of Internet Explorer
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In 2003, Internet Explorer's market share was almost 90 percent. At the same time it was hardly developed any further.
"The features we had in Mosaic are pretty close to what we have in Internet Explorer in 2003. It's not identical, but it's very much the same"
"The functionality of Mosaic [at the beginning of the 1990s] roughly corresponds to the functionality of Internet Explorer in 2003. It is not identical, but very similar."
After the appearance of Internet Explorer 6, the development team was almost completely dissolved in autumn 2001. It took Microsoft five years to release a new version. It was not until the Windows Vista operating system was being developed that a new team completed the development of Internet Explorer 7, which was published on October 19, 2006.
The widespread use of Internet Explorer had meanwhile resulted in websites being "optimized". Many authors no longer followed the official HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium when designing their websites, but designed their websites in such a way that they looked and worked best in Internet Explorer, without considering compatibility with alternative browsers. The acid browser tests show that Internet Explorer deviates comparatively far from the HTML standard. In some cases, this resulted in users of alternative browsers being excluded from certain offers such as online banking or online trading.
The high market share of the Microsoft browser also favored the spread of malware such as computer viruses and computer worms . Its authors took advantage of the fact that most computers used the same standard software for a long time: Windows as the operating system, Internet Explorer as the web browser and Microsoft Office for office work. The “ monoculture ” allowed malware to spread faster as soon as a new security hole became known in one of the programs.
Standards are being increasingly supported again
Due to the notorious security problems of the Microsoft product and more extensive functions of other browsers (which in addition to Mozilla Firefox also include Opera from the Norwegian company of the same name, the Konqueror from the K Desktop Environment and the Apple Safari , which is partly based on this ), arose since the mid-2000s Years, first on websites on technical topics, later in general, again a heterogeneous browser landscape, which makes it impossible to restrict the browser to a few. In addition, there are more and more browsers for PDAs and cell phones that are used by potential customers who are supposedly well-funded, and accordingly, compatibility is important. With the boom in smartphones since the 2010s, extensive compatibility became essential. In addition, browser manufacturers are increasingly integrating themselves into the work of the W3C, instead of using their market power to try to enforce their proposals for web technologies. As a result, the standards of the W3C have regained importance.
Alternative browsers are gaining market share
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Due to the many security holes in Internet Explorer , some of which have remained unknown for a long time , the demand for alternative browsers increased. In July 2004, Internet Explorer lost one percent of its market share to Mozilla products when serious security holes became known.
In June 2004 Microsoft called the Internet Explorer development team back together. Primarily the supporters of Mozilla announced the second round of the browser war. This and other alternative browsers quickly found supporters among the dissatisfied Internet Explorer users thanks to new, innovative functions. In addition, web developers also recommended these alternative browsers, as they better implement the current standards. As a result of all this , articles about the new browser alternatives have appeared regularly in many US online magazines, but also in German IT magazines such as Heise online . Special attention was paid to Mozilla Firefox , thanks to its ever-increasing popularity .
With the Internet initiative Spread Firefox and large-scale newspaper advertisements in the New York Times and the FAZ - financed by donations - intensive advertising was carried out in 2004 to make the program popular.
Firefox was the first browser to continuously steal market share from Internet Explorer. This fact and the partly outdated technology of IE 6 have led Microsoft to invest in the further development of Internet Explorer again since the beginning of 2005. Finally, on October 19, 2006, Microsoft released Windows Internet Explorer 7 . This supports functions such as tabbed browsing and larger parts of web standards such as CSS2 and should thus reduce the technical backlog to alternative browsers that have had these functions with them for years.
On September 1, 2008, Google surprisingly announced an in-house web browser called Chrome , which it advertised on its own website. By optimizing for performance (especially the speed of the JavaScript engine, which is used to display in-house web applications such as Google Docs or Gmail ), a race for the supposedly "fastest" browser was initiated, in which Safari, Opera and Participate Firefox. Chrome was able to gain a few percentage points of market share by mid-2010.
HTML5 and addons bring a breath of fresh air
While Microsoft's browser continues to lose users according to various independent statistics from large websites, Google Chrome in particular is gaining rapidly, for example, Chrome was the number 1 browser for visitors to the Wikimedia project in October 2012.
On the technological side, the fight for the favor of internet users determines not only speed, which is measurable thanks to various benchmarks and thus usable for marketing campaigns, but also the range of additional software (" add-ons ") that can be installed in the browser and the independence from insecure plug-ins. ins like Adobe Flash or Java .
The pros and cons of various browsers are also discussed from an ideological point of view: The Mozilla Foundation, as a non-profit organization, presents its browser in the context of its efforts to "make the Internet a better place for us all". Google, on the other hand, primarily cites the technical qualities of their browser, while critics advise against the use of Chrome because data protection is comparatively poor - with other browsers, unsolicited transfer of entered data for further use in a stock corporation would be unthinkable - and because the monopoly-like position of the underlying company should not be promoted.
In particular, such monopoly positions are still of great importance for the browser war, since in EU antitrust law the abuse of positions of power in the software sector is monitored and sanctioned if necessary by the EU competition commissioner .
See also
Web links
- Court's Findings of Fact in the Microsoft process that describes the browser war (English)
- AOL discontinues Netscape completely
- extensive usage statistics for web browsers in the English Wikipedia
Individual evidence
- ↑ golem.de : 15 years of the WWW: The Browser Wars
- ↑ See HTML specification
- ^ "Victor: Software empire pays high price" , John Borland, CNET.com, April 15, 2003
- ↑ cf. Court's Finding of Fact in the Microsoft Trial on December 5, 1999
- ↑ Browser wars: High price, huge rewards ( Memento from June 3, 2004 in the Internet Archive ), ZDNet, April 15, 2003.
- ↑ Memoirs From the Browser Wars , Eric. Blog (), April 15, 2003.
- ↑ AOL is buying Netscape! , Heise Online, November 24, 1998.
- ^ Off for the Netscape Navigator ( Memento from January 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) In: Frankfurter Rundschau. January 3, 2008.
- ↑ https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Richterin-gestetzt-Demonstration-von-modularem-Windows-58381.html
- ↑ Microsoft's Internet Explorer loses shares compared to Mozilla / Firefox . In: heise online. September 16, 2004.
- ↑ fire! , Firefox advertisement in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 2, 2004.
- ↑ Google Chrome: Google attacks Microsoft with its own browser. In: Heise Online. September 2, 2008.
- ↑ Mozilla counters Google's download statistics for Chrome. In: Heise Online. May 2, 2010.
- ↑ http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201210-201210-bar
- ↑ http://clicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/
- ↑ https://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-10/SquidReportClients.htm
- ↑ Google Chrome on the attack in europe ( Memento from February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ https://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-10/SquidReportClients.htm
- ↑ http ://www.internet Speed.net/tag/browser Speed /
- ^ A b Mozilla Foundation: The Mozilla Manifesto, v0.9 , accessed March 6, 2013.
- ^ Website Chrome ( Memento from March 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Frank Patalong: Data suction browser: Web community forces Google to fix Chrome. In: Spiegel Online . September 4, 2008, accessed June 9, 2018 .
- ↑ http://www.opera.com/privacy#browser
- ^ Benjamin Schischka: Cons: Critics warn against Google monopoly. In: PCWelt.de. February 2, 2010, accessed February 6, 2013.
- ↑ http://www.taz.de/!104190/