Question

Summarize the “Browser War” video. Discuss how the browser got left behind.

Answer 1

Browser Wars is known to began with the stiff rivalry between Netscape and Microsoft. It all started in 1993 when Mosaic sold the licensing rights to companies such as Netscape and Microsoft. In 994 Netscape released Navigator which was affordable, reliable and easy to use. Navigator gained 60% of the market share only in 6 months. Netscape was commanding the battle when Microsoft made an entry into the market in the 1990s. However Microsoft' s Internet Explorer struggled against Netscape's Navigator for much of the war phase. It gradually increased its dominance when Microsoft decided to bundle it with its all time popular operating system "Windows". Since Microsoft was ready to bear losses over the browser battle, it eventually turned out to be fruitful for them when both the companies Netscape and Microsoft released their latest version browser suffering from feature creep in 1997. This led Netscape to release their source code to spur collaboration and Mozilla foundation was born. By the year 2000, Internet Explorer remained the ruler.

The next round of browser war initiated in early 2000s when the open source Mozilla project took the Navigator's code and came back to haunt IE and culminated into Firefox browser. In 2003 Apple developed and released its web browser Safari. By 2008 Firefox surpassed Internet Explorer in market shares for 6 weeks and new browser Google Chrome took birth. IE's market share plunged by the emergence of new interactive browsers. Despite being the latest entrant into the arena, Chrome quickly gained more users and so far is the market leader. Nevertheless the war is still on.