The Browsers Wars - A History

I have underwear older than the Internet.

I have underwear older than the Internet. But the way we interact with the Internet does have a rich if very recent history.

Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer and Safari

And it's amazing and exciting how fast this history is evolving. Exciting innovations to the way we tune into the World Wide Web seem to be introduced almost daily. The competition for market share among the five major contenders still left standing in the war among modern-day Web browsers are what's driving all of this innovation making the Internet a more powerful and useful means of communication, entertainment and commerce for all of us. There are dozens of Web browsers in use today - many of which I've never heard of. There are many browsers that have come and gone. But for now the five most popular Web browsers world-wide are Microsoft's InternetExplorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Web browser called Chrome, the Opera Web browser and Apple's Safari. These five browsers are the current cream that have risen to the top of the still evolving war being waged to answer the question - What's the best Web browser?

The world's very first Web browser called WorldWideWeb was created in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet. He was one of the scientists working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and he envisioned his invention as being nothing other than a useful way for scientists all over the world to more easily share data and otherwise communicate.

On January 23, 1993 two students from the University of Illinois named Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released the first version of Mosaic. This became the first popular Web browser used to connect to servers around the world. In October, 1994, Marc Andreessen having formed a company called Netscape, released an updated version of Mosaic and called it Netscape Navigator. This quickly became the most popular browser world-wide and remained so until the advent of Internet Explorer. Netscape Navigator was a commercial browser but an open source version of the Netscape browser was released in 2002 and was named Mozilla and then re-named and released as the popular modern-day browser Firefox in November, 2004. FireFox is open-source software. This means that teams of hundreds of computer engineers and designers work on constantly improving Firefox on a voluntary basis.

On August 23, 1995 Microsoft released the Windows 95 operating system which included a pre-installed Web browser called Internet Explorer. By bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, microsoft gained a huge advantage. Internet Explorer usage share peaked at over 95% in 2002. Ever since then however, it has been loosing market share to its modern day competitors especially FireFox.

The first version of Opera was made available in the summer of 1996. The first beta release of Apple's Safari was in January of 2003. In September of 2008 Google released Google Chrome.

Which Browser Has the Most Features

The pie chart below shows the market share that each of the five browsers currently hold.

Internet Explorer Is Slowly Loosing Market Share

As you can see, Internet Explorer is still by far the most widely used browser in the world. The simple reason for this is that since it comes pre-installed on all Windows operating systems most people don't bother experimenting with anything else. Vanilla ice cream tastes just fine. But for geeky computer nerds there's Firefox and there's nothing vanilla about Firefox. Firefox is so popular with computer nerds because it is so customizable. It's so customizable, in fact, that tinkering with combinations of the hundreds of add-ons, extensions, themes and skins is almost like building your own browser. One Firefox add-on that I really love is called Cool Iris. Cool Iris puts a tiny blue ball next to any link that you mouse over so that placing your mouse over that ball will cause that link to open instantly in a smaller page on top of the page you're on. Firefox has dozens of nifty little add-ons like that that make the browser so much more powerful and fun to use than plain old vanilla Internet Explorer. Granted, Microsoft's newest browser Internet Explorer 8 is trying to catch up. It has added some interesting features but it has a very long ways to go to catch up with FireFox in letting you customize the way you browse the Web.

What's the Fastest Browser

When it comes to speed Google Chrome wins easily over its four competitors.

Google's Chrome Is The Speed King

Google's new browser launched on September 2, 2008 with a very simple no-toolbars, no-buttons interface. It's the essence of simplicity much like the Google dot com homepage. Google Chrome has a cool feature I like. If a page you have opened in a separate tab causes that tab to crash, it doesn't bring down the whole browser. Chrome like Internet Explorer 8, Opera and Safari has a feature officially known as Private Browsing and unofficially called Porn-mode. This feature turns off your browser cache, history and cookies. Firefox 3.1 due to be released soon will also have this feature. Recent tests have shown that the newest version of Opera, which is version 9.6 is almost as fast at loading pages as Chrome. It has more features than Chrome though not nearly as many features as Firefox. One feature that Opera has that no other browser has is the ability to react to mouse gestures. For instance holding down the right button and moving the mouse to the left will take you back to the previous page. Click here to see all of the mouse gestures in Opera. Opera may be the most stable of any of the top five browsers. It almost never sticks or crashes. But back to the subject of speed - Apple claims that Safari 4 which is still in beta will be as fast or faster than Chrome. But for now Chrome is the fastest browser to load and is the fastest at loading pages.

Which Browser Looks the Best

Which of the five major browsers render pages most accurately and attractively? Ah, that would be Opera and Safari.

Internet Explorer Ranks Last In Acid Test

Which of the five major browsers do the worst job rendering pages? Ah, that would be Internet Explorer hands down. If you're visiting this page with any of Microsoft's browsers whether with IE 6, IE 7 or the brand new IE 8, it is going to look clunky and, well, cheesy compared to what I intended it to look like when I built it and compared to what it looks like in all four of the other browsers. This page displays just fine in FireFox and Chrome but it displays even better in Opera and Safari. Why is this? Because of W3C's Acid3 test, that's why. Acid3 is a series of 100 tests that browsers must pass to be in compliance with the W3C who are the over-seerers of the Internet. Opera and Safari pass all the tests. FireFox and Chrome pass over 90% of them but even the newest Internet Explorer which is Internet Explorer 8 released the 19th of this month can't even pass half of them! That's pretty sorry.

What's the Best Web Browser

So, what's the best Web browser? ... Ah, that would be Firefox.

So what is the best Web browser? In my humble opinion, that would be Firefox for a number of reasons.

Firefox Is Eating Into Internet Explorer's Market Share

First, Firefox loads itself and also loads pages faster than any of Microsoft's browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft's newest browser. It's not as blazing fast as Chrome but you probably won't notice that much difference. Secondly, Firefox allows you to customize your copy of it's free software to a far greater extent than any other available browser. I've already mentioned Cooliris and to me that one Add-on alone is reason enough to use Firefox as my default browser. Click here to see a list of the most popular Firefox Add-ons. Another reason for you to switch to Firefox from Internet Explorer is that Firefox is so much more secure and less susceptible to bugs that can invade your computer. The bad guys spend time writing code to hack Internet Explorer since it has such a large market share and they spend little effort writing code to hack Firefox or any of the other browsers mentioned on this page because most of the people who use browsers other than Internet Explorer are too computer savvy to allow intrusive junk to penetrate their defenses. So browsing the Internet with FireFox is far safer than going on-line with any of Microsoft's browsers. If you want to give Firefox a try, I've got a link to it and the three other alternatives to Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer on your computer. You couldn't un-install it even if you wanted too. You need Internet Explorer to continue to receive Windows updates. If you have all of your Windows computers configured to automatically download and install updates (and you should), Windows will continue to do that even if Internet Explorer is no longer configured to be your default browser.

Newest Browser Market Share

Current As Of December 2010

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