REVIEW: Browser Wars

Leave a reply

Browser Wars is the first episode in the documentary series Download: the true story of the
Internet. Written and presented by John Heilemann, the series explores the emergence and
development of the age of the Internet- A revolution which changed and continues to change
the way our world “works, plays, communicates, shops and even falls in love” (John
Heilemann).

Episode one: Browser Wars examines the most notable browser war of the 90s, the battle
between Microsoft and Netscape, a pronounced “David and Goliath” battle.

Although the documentary does provide an amount of information on the history of the world
wide web, the spotlight subject is the corporate competition. So, a bit of back story before we
proceed. By 1995 Netscape Communicator’s Netscape Navigator (pictured below) was the
popular choice of browser in the marketplace. Marc Andreessen, co-author of Mosaic and co-
founder of Netscape Communications Corporation created the Mosaic model that Netscape
Navigator and most of the competing browsers of the time followed. Other browsers launched in
1994 were IBM Web Explorer, Navipress, SlipKnot and MacWeb. These are noted in the
documentary but not presented as the real competitors in the Browser War.

As a reaction to the sudden uprise of Netscape Navigator as the most widely used web browser,
Microsoft (the “Goliath” of the battle) created Internet Explorer 1.0 through licensing Mosaic. The
competitors in the browser marketplace saw this space of time as an opportunity to make
billions and claim control of the kingdom of the World Wide Web, and so, the proceeding few
years saw the marketplace in abundance of new releases with rapid developments and new
features added. Some of these monumental developments were a free download of Internet
Explorer 2.0, the bundling of other applications to full internet suites, Netscape’s Javascript
followed by Microsoft’s JScript, Internet Explorer 3.0 (1996) offering scripting support and CSS.

Back and forth it went, until the first browser war ended in 1997/1998 with Internet Explorer
having no remaining serious competition for its market share. I could explain to you in detail the
tennis match of technology, however John Heilemann is an expert and I recommend watching
Browser Wars to see for yourself the extraordinary story.

History of the Internet - the Browser wars

Written by Ian Peter

(with thanks to the excellent Wikipedia article on the same subject)

By mid-1995, popular culture had begun to notice the web, and Netscape Navigator was the de
facto standard for web browsing at that time. An ex-colleague of Tim Berners-Lee called Mark
Andreesen founded the Netscape Corporation, which built on the previous Mosaic browser to
establish the first mass-market browser, the Netscape Navigator.

In August 1995 Netscape became a public company, fuelled by the success of the world wide
web, and, to many minds ushered in the Dotcom boom (see our article here which traces the
 dotcom bubble to earlier non-Internet origins, however)

To that point of time, Microsoft had thought the future action would be in multi channel
interactive cable television. However the success of Netscape caused it to release Internet
Explorer 1.0 as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus Pack in August 1995. Internet Explorer
2.0 was released three months later, and by then the race was on.

New versions of Netscape Navigator (later Netscape Communicator) and Internet Explorer were
released at a rapid pace over the following few years. Features often took priority over bug
fixes, and therefore the browser wars were a time of unstable browsers and lots of user
headaches. Internet Explorer only began to approach par with its competition with version 3.0
(1996).

In 1997 Netscape still held 72% of the browser market. But in October 1997, Internet Explorer
4.0 was released and changed the tides of the browser wars. It was faster and it adopted the
W3C's published specifications more faithfully than Netscape Navigator 4.0.

A lot was at stake for these two companies involved in the browser wars. A popular web
browser could earn a lot of money: search engine companies would bid to be the default tool
used in the web browser, and other companies with a web presence would bid to be listed in the
default set of bookmarks which was preinstalled with the browser. Since a web browser is a
powerful gateway to a great deal of information, the company which controlled this gateway
could conceivably have a lot of influence over its users.

Microsoft had two strong advantages in the browser wars. One was simply an issue of
resources: Netscape began with a nearly 90% market share and a good deal of public goodwill,
but as a relatively small company deriving the great bulk of its income from what was essentially
a single product (Navigator and its derivatives), it was financially vulnerable. Netscape's total
revenue never exceeded the interest income generated by Microsoft's cash on hand.

The other, more important, advantage was that Microsoft Windows had a monopoly in the
operating system marketplace that could be used to leverage IE to a dominant position. IE was
bundled with every copy of Windows; therefore, even though early versions of IE were markedly
inferior to Netscape's browser, Microsoft was still able to enlarge its market share. And IE
remained free while the enormous revenues from Windows were used to fund its development
and marketing, resulting in rapid improvements until it was so similar to Netscape feature-wise
that users had no desire to download and install Netscape.

Other Microsoft actions also hurt Netscape, such as:

 Netscape's business model was to give away its browser but sell server software. Microsoft
understood this and attacked Netscape's revenue sources, bundling Microsoft's Internet
Information Server web server "free" with server versions of Windows, and offering Microsoft
customers workalike clones of Netscape's proxy server, mail server, news server, and other
software free or at steep discounts. This didn't have much effect at first, as much of Netscape's
revenues came from customers using Sun Microsystems servers, but the gradual result was to
make Windows NT more popular as a server for Internet and intranet while cutting off
Netscape's income.
 Microsoft created licensing agreements with computer manufacturers requiring them to provide
desktop icons for IE, while penalizing them for shipping Netscape on their computers.
 Microsoft made it very easy for small and medium ISPs to release branded versions of Internet
Explorer, and with few exceptions they did, meaning that users of many ISPs were encouraged
to use Internet Explorer and not Netscape.
 Microsoft created a licensing agreement with AOL to base AOL's primary interface on IE rather
than Netscape.
 Microsoft purchased and released a web authoring tool, FrontPage, that tended to create pages
that looked better in IE.

The effect of these actions were to "cut off Netscape's air supply," as stated by a Microsoft
executive during the United States v. Microsoft case (which resulted in Microsoft being
prosecuted for having used its monopoly status to manipulate the market). This, together with
several bad business decisions on Netscape's part, led to Netscape's defeat by the end of 1998,
after which the company was acquired by America Online for USD $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer
became the new dominant browser, attaining a peak of about 96% of the web browser usage
share during 2002, more than Netscape had at its peak.

Thus ended the pioneering era of web browsers, with the dominant software company
dominating the market. Microsoft might have been a late entry, but to this day it has remained
dominant in the browser market, challenged only recently by the excellent Mozilla browser.

Lovers of legal battles and supporters of the free software movement can see in the browser
wars classic examples of what began to happen as the Internet began to move towards mass
markets. And that move to mass markets most closely finds a birthday in August,1995.

The History of the Browser Wars: When Netscape Met Microsoft

By Jay Hoffmann

Published: June 19, 2017

Timeline: October 1, 1997

Let’s talk about about the “Browser Wars.” They kicked off in the mid-90s, at a time when the
world was just starting to come online. The web was still a fuzzy, undefined medium. Those
who did decide to visit the web for the first time found themselves standing at the precipice of a
technological arms race between two behemoth browsers. It was a conflict that was public,
publicized and wide reaching. Its repercussions would ripple out to web designers, web users
and the software community at large for years to come.

If 1995 did feel like the right time to check out the World Wide Web, chances are pretty high that
you would be using one browser in particular to do it. Netscape Navigator.

Netscape had a pretty meteoric rise to the top of the web world. The company began pretty
soon after software engineer Marc Andreessen graduated from the University of Illinois in 1994.
While he was studying there, he had worked on one of the first ever cross platform
browsers, NCSA Mosaic, which became the most popular among early browser choices.
So not long after he left Illinois, Andreessen was contacted by Jim Clark, a bit of a legend in the
Silicon Valley area. Clark and Andreessen met a few times, and decided that a top of the line
commercial browser was exactly what the market needed. So they went back to NCSA, and
walked out with a team of top engineers ready to make that happen. By the end of 1994, they
had already delivered a first step. Originally slated to be called Mosaic, the browser they
released to the world became known (mostly for legal reasons) as Netscape Navigator, and the
company, Netscape Communications.

If you were trying to connect to the web in the 90’s, you’d most likely head down to your local
computer shop and check out what browsers they had for sale. There was, after all, some
alternatives to Netscape. Spyglass Incorporated, for instance, had licensed code from NCSA to
create their own commercial browser. Ultimately, this code was rewritten, but it was still
released as Spyglass Mosaic.

So you’d check out a few options. But if you asked for a recommendation from the shop’s
owner, he’d probably end up pointing you straight to Netscape. And by the way, did you know
they were even giving away their browser for free?

In the months leading up to the release of Netscape Navigator in December of 1994, the team
began beta testing their browser by giving downloads on their website. It helped them discover
bugs quickly, and embraced the openness that kind of went side by side with the World Wide
Web. After the browser’s official release, Netscape more or less kept this practice up, making
“evaluation” versions of their browser free to download. The real money, after all, was with
enterprise licenses and software. So Netscape kind of walked the line there, making profits from
individual sales but accessible for free to more savvy users. For better or worse, this would
eventually come back to hurt Netscape.

That didn’t stop Netscape from being impressive though. The browser team, most of whom had
made their mark writing code at Mosaic, brought things up another notch with Navigator.
Already in its first release, the browser sported broader image support, cookies, and snazzy
design elements.

At the time, the HTML process was still a bit undefined, so Netscape just rolled full steam
ahead. If you were a web designer at the time, there was a lot to get excited about. In the
incremental releases that followed in the first half of 1995, Netscape added custom fonts,
background colors, and embedded media. By version 2.0, released in August of 1995, they had
added HTML frames, image maps, and probably most impressively, the first ever iteration of
Javascript.

Did you know I had a newsletter?

Each week I'm sending out stories just like this one all about the world wide web. So if you love
history, and you love the web, why not sign up?
Email Address

SIGN UP NOW
Coding a site for Netscape browsers was a dream come true for a lot of designers. With each
subsequent release, the whole web medium drew into more complete focus. With each step,
web designers could add new layers of interactivity and visual polish. True, these websites often
would appear broken in other browsers. But by the middle of 1995, Netscape had jumped to an
80% share of the market. It might seem short-sighted now, but at the time, coding for Netscape
was the only way to go.

And it showed. By the time Netscape Navigator version 2 was released, the company had
actually managed to accrue some revenue. Jim Clark, however, was not one to rest on his
laurels. He began pushing his board to take the company public.

It was a bit of an unprecedented move. Netscape had only been a company for a year, and they
had only recently began to see real revenue come in. But Netscape did have a few things going
for them. For one, they had a kind of cult like following. The press lauded their efforts, and their
users evangelized their software. And at the center of it all was Marc Andreessen, who had
been propelled to virtual rock star status.

So Netscape went public. For a company of Netscape’s size, their IPO went incredibly well. It
exceeded all expectations, and stocks soared throughout the first day. Clark, for his part, made
over $600 million that day. Andreessen got to the cover of Time, and began calling for the dawn
of a new age when the PC operating system would live entirely on the web, and specifically with
Netscape.
And that’s when Netscape got their first real competition from the goliath they knew would
eventually come around: Microsoft.

A few months before the IPO, Microsoft engineers paid a visit to Netscape offices. According to
Microsoft, their intention was to get a lay of the land as they planned the future of Microsoft and
the web.

You see, Microsoft had largely ignored the web (and the Internet at large) for some time. Bill
Gates failed to recognize the importance of this new network early on, so the company fell back
on their core competency: personal computing. That means, if you used the Windows operating
system (like 90% of PC users), you would have to go purchase a browser separately.

Microsoft’s enterprise customers, however, began to ask for this kind of support. And some
employees began experimenting with setting up web servers and a central information hub,
which would later transform into the Microsoft Network. Then, Marc Andreessen began talking
up Netscape not just as a browser, but as a new, cross-platform operating system. He went as
far as saying that in the future, Netscape would reduce Microsoft to a set of “poorly debugged
device drivers.”

Gates did a quick about face in May of 1995. He sent out a memo to all Microsoft employees
titled “The Internet Tidal Wave.” In it, Gates outlined a new future for his company, one
connected extricably to the Internet. His paranoia for competition was also clear. Netscape,
Gates demanded, was a company that Microsoft would need to “match and beat.”

Bolstered by support from the very top of their company, a few Microsoft engineers got together
to start working on a new browser. And that’s why a few of them ended up at a meeting at
Netscape.

Over the years, this meeting has become the stuff of legends, primarily because there are
two completely different versions of how it went down. In Microsoft’s version, the meeting went
off without a hitch. In a long, but productive exchange, the two companies shared ideas and
visions for the future.

In Netscape’s version, things are quite a bit different. According to Andresseen’s notes,
Microsoft came to them with an ultimatum. Join up or move out of the way. Microsoft offered
Netscape a meager sum for their browsers code base. When the team refused, employees from
Microsoft threatened to eliminate them from the market by any means necessary.

Now, keep in mind that at the time, Netscape had a very rational fear of competition
from Microsoft. Bill Gates had notoriously stomped out adversaries in the past without a second
thought. And already, Netscape had begun to consult an anti-trust lawyer to prepare against a
possible assault. So it’s possible that Netscape employees framed the meeting to give more
credence to their legal battles. But it’s also clear that Microsoft was more hostile in the meeting
then they let on.

From that day forward, the two companies rarely spoke. What followed was an escalation of
conflict that affected web users, web designers, and even the World Wide Web itself. As
Netscape’s success grew, Microsoft got their own browser ready.
It was called Internet Explorer. And version 1 was released fifteen days after Netscape’s
IPO. The browser team at Microsoft was still very small, so the code itself was (somewhat
ironically) licensed from Spyglass Mosaic, a fork of the code Andreessen himself had worked
on.

IE was, at first, far from impressive. It was released as an at-retail extension for Windows ’95,
and initially, did very little to damage Netscape’s market share. With a choice between a world
class browser everyone’s talking about, and a slower, pared down version that integrated with
Windows, most people chose the former.

Then came December 7, 1995. Hot off the heels of version 2 of Internet Explorer, which showed
some major improvements in a few short months, Bill Gates held a press conference. His
intent was to lay out Microsoft’s web strategy. Those out there with some knowledge of World
War II might recognize that date. It’s the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Naturally, the
press had a field day.

“Microsoft Storms the Web,” one headline read. “Microsoft Takes War to the Net” read another.

In fact, the tone was a bit more restrained than that (but maybe only a little). During the press
conference, Gates announced that Microsoft would be even more committed to the web in the
coming months. The Internet was Microsoft’s next big play. As for the competition? Well, it was
pretty clear that Gates didn’t want to just enter the marketplace. He wanted to dominate it.

For the next few years, Netscape and Microsoft waged war (these were the Browser Wars after
all). It was not uncommon to see a new minor release of each browser every month. For most
users, this battle raged way over their heads. All they saw where a whirlwind of new features.
There came esoteric plugin support, proprietary presentational HTML elements and all sorts of
unique hacks. Even when one browser or the other supported web standards, they did so only
at a surface level. So when features were “supported” by both browsers, they would often be
interpreted and rendered in completely different ways.

Now imagine, for a moment, that you were a web designer at this time. You’re still trying to work
your way through the HTML specification, which is at this point still kind of dry and vague. But
then Netscape says you can add a scrolling banner to the top of your site! So you add it. But it
doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. But in Internet Explorer, you can take advantage of CSS
positioning. Of course, that wouldn’t look right in Netscape’s browser.

Is it any wonder that in the mid to late 90’s it was common to see banners on sites that read
“Best displayed on Netscape” or “Best displayed on Internet Explorer.” Without standards to
guide an ever confounding number of features, and with the two companies mostly at odds,
support was fractured and uneven. Many developers had no choice but to tailor their
websites for one browser or the other. Of course, it was ultimately the users that suffered.

Meanwhile, the two browsers only scaled up their efforts.

By version 3, Netscape had introduced a good amount of features still in use today. Things like
tables and frames, autofilling forms, and a more advanced version of Javascript. The release of
this version also marked Netscape’s peak in terms of browser share, a startling 90%.
After that, Netscape began to focus on accompanying features. Starting with version 4, they
added suite of tools to their browser, bundled together into Netscape Communicator.
Communicator included tools for email, IRC and news. For many, this meant the convenience of
having everything in one place. For others, this made the browser bloated and unwieldy.

Microsoft took a slightly different route. Instead of adding extensions to their browser, they
leveraged their position in the personal computing marketplace. Which, in the 90’s, was
basically a stranglehold. So even as Internet Explorer improved and caught up to Netscape,
Microsoft started pushing their distribution channels. They gave away the browser for free to PC
manufacturers and Internet Service Providers to bundle into their hardware. They lowered the
price of their browser for Microsoft Windows users. And they paid large web portals like AOL to
push users toward IE.

Then, with the release of Internet Explorer 3.0, Microsoft dropped the hammer. They included
this version, for free, bundled right into the Windows ’95 operating system. No longer would
users have to go to their local electronics shop and chose from a few competitive options. They
would have a browser built right in that, frankly, works almost as well as any other option out
there. For free. It even boasted some new unique features, like fairly broad CSS support.

All at once, Netscape’s pricing model completely fell apart.

On the morning of October 1, 1997, Netscape engineers came to their offices to kind of a
strange sight. The night before, Microsoft employees had been celebrating the release of IE 4. A
few of them hoisted a giant Internet Explorer logo model onto the back of a truck, brought it to
Netscape and dumped it in their corporate office’s fountain. Later that day, Netscape engineers
hoisted their own Mozilla logo on top of the E and added a sign. It said “Netscape: 72, Microsoft:
18,” the current split of the browser market. But that changed. And fast. The release of Internet
Explorer 4 for free, and Microsoft’s aggressive push to distribute it, started to turn things in their
favor.

Netscape continued to innovate, but they knew they couldn’t keep up. So in January of 1998,
they open sourced their browser, and began giving it away for free. But even that wasn’t
enough. By the end of 1998, Microsoft had claimed 50% of the market. By 1999, that had risen
to almost 80%. The tables had officially turned.

Microsoft’s efforts wouldn’t go completely unchecked. For one thing, Microsoft had licensed their
code from Spyglass with the promise of royalties from total sales. When they started giving
away their browser for free, Spyglass sued for the share of profits they would now never see.
They settled out of court, but it wasn’t long before Spyglass faded from existence altogether.

Then, of course, were the charges brought against Microsoft by the United States Government.
In the summer of 1998, Microsoft went on trial for violating antitrust laws and a consent decree
from a few years previous. The US Department of Justice argued that by giving away their
browser for free, and bundling it into their operating system, they forced consumers to use their
product and pushed competitors out of the market. This, along with the hostile pressure that
Microsoft put on manufacturers to include Internet Explorer in their platforms, created a
monopoly position for the company.

Microsoft’s argument was that Internet Explorer was an integral piece of their operating system,
and that Windows ’98 couldn’t function without it. But that argument proved to be flimsy. In his
deposition, Gates often came off as arrogant and evasive, and the evidence against Microsoft
seemed staggering. Executives from multiple companies, including AOL, testified that Microsoft
had pressured them into prioritizing Internet Explorer. These companies were told that they
were either with or against Microsoft. The trial would last for years, and Gates caught most of
the pressure.

In 2000, the presiding Judge issued his findings of fact, which, among other things, found that
Microsoft was abusing a monopoly position, and that it should be broken up into two companies.
This was eventually overturned by an appeals court, but it was enough to rattle Bill Gates for
years to come, and leave Microsoft reeling from the process.

In November of 1998, Netscape was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. It was the end of an era, and,
as it turns out, the beginning of the end. Netscape continued to release new versions of their
browser for years to come. But as their priorities shifted towards enterprise software, the
browser suffered. Eventually, Microsoft wrestled almost complete control over the market.

By the early 2000’s, the Browser Wars ended, and a period of stagnation followed. But just on
the horizon, a few open source browsers waited in the wings, ready to offer another bout of
competition.