Browser wars

A browser war is competition for dominance in the usage share of web browsers. The first browser war was Microsoft's Internet Explorer against Netscape's Navigator during the late 1990s. Browser wars continued with the decline of Internet Explorer's market share since 2003 and the increasing popularity of browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

In more recent years, the introduction of HTML5, CSS 3 and extensive client-side scripting to the World Wide Web, as well as more widespread use of smartphones and other mobile devices for browsing the web, have added new browsers, ensuring that browser battles continue.

Background

The World Wide Web is an Internet-based hypertext system invented in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser WorldWideWeb, later renamed Nexus, and released it for the NeXTstep platform in 1991.

By the end of 1992 other browsers had appeared, many of them based on the libwww library. These included Unix browsers such as Line Mode Browser, ViolaWWW, Erwise and MidasWWW, and MacWWW/Samba for the Mac. Even though these browsers tended to be simple HTML viewers, relying on external helper applications to view multimedia content, they provided choice to users both in browsers and platforms.