Once the Web existed, the program you viewed it with became strategically valuable, and two companies fought over it. The browser wars of the 1990s turned the browser from a simple document viewer into a programmable platform, the runtime that an enormous share of software now targets.
The idea
A browser is a client runtime. It parses HTML and CSS into a visual layout and runs JavaScript, so a web page is not a static document but a small program executing on your machine.
The first browser war
Between 1995 and 2001, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer competed hard for the same users. New features were added constantly, including Netscape’s JavaScript, which Microsoft reimplemented as JScript, and the first commercial support for Cascading Style Sheets. Each release tried to outdo the other.
From viewer to platform
That competition pushed browsers to render richer pages and run more code, and a document viewer became an execution environment. Today a vast amount of software, from email to spreadsheets to design tools, runs inside the browser rather than as a native application. That is why the browser is now one of the most important pieces of software in the world.
Why it matters
The rivalry, later renewed by Chrome and Firefox, drove the rapid feature development that made the Web a universal client platform rather than merely a way to read pages. The thing Netscape and Microsoft were really fighting over was who would own the runtime of the future.
Related Notes
- The World Wide Web, the thing browsers display
- Network Protocols, how the browser fetches pages
- History of the Internet, the wider arc
- History of Computing, the section index
Sources
- “Browser wars,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars . Supports the first browser war (1995-2001) between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, the addition of JavaScript (reimplemented by Microsoft as JScript) and commercial CSS support, and competition driving rapid release and feature development.