Brief history

Tim Berners-Lee, who pioneered the use of hypertext for sharing information, created the first web browser, named the WorldWideWeb, in 1990, and introduced it to colleagues at CERN in March 1991. Since then the development of web browsers has been inseparably intertwined with the development of the web itself.

The explosion in popularity of the web was triggered by NCSA Mosaic which was a graphical browser running originally on UNIX but soon ported to the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1.0 was released in September 1993. Marc Andreessen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quitted forming a company that would later become known as Netscape Communications Corporation.

Netscape released its flagship Navigator product in October 1994, and it took off the next year. Microsoft, which had so far missed the Internet wave, now entered the fray with its Internet Explorer product, hastily purchased from Spyglass Inc. This began the browser wars, the fight for the web browser market between the software giant Microsoft and the start-up company largely responsible for popularizing the World Wide Web, Netscape.

The wars put the web in the hands of millions of ordinary PC users, but showed how commercialization of the internet could ruin standards efforts. Both Microsoft and Netscape liberally incorporated proprietary extensions to HTML in their products, and tried to gain an edge by product differentiation. The wars ended in 1998 when it became clear that Netscape's declining market share trend was irreversible. This was in part due to Microsoft's integrating its browser with its operating system and bundling deals with OEMs; the company faced antitrust litigation on these charges.

Netscape responded by open sourcing its product, creating Mozilla. This did nothing to slow Netscape's declining market share. The company was purchased by America Online in late 1998. Mozilla has since evolved into a stable and powerful browser suite with a small but steady market share.

Opera, a speedy browser popular in handheld devices and in some countries was released in 1996 and remains a niche player in the PC web browser market.

The Lynx browser remains popular in the Linux market and with vision impaired users due to its entirely text-based nature. There are also several text-mode browsers with advanced features, such as links and its forks.

While the Macintosh scene too has traditionally been dominated by Internet Explorer and Netscape, the future appears to belong to Apple's Safari which is based on the KHTML rendering engine of the open source conqueror browser.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would no longer be made available as a separate product but would be part of the evolution of its Windows platform.