BIOS: Technology Means Business

In the early 1990s there were many simple graphic-oriented World Wide Web browsers available.

The first which reached widespread popularity was Mosaic, developed at NCSA. Several companies licensed it to create their own commercial browsers, such as Spry Mosaic and Spyglass Mosaic.

One of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreesen, founded the company Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mosaic Netscape. To resolve legal issues with NCSA, the company was renamed Netscape Communications and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser improved on Mosaic’s usability and reliability, and it soon dominated the market, helped by the fact that ‘evaluation copies’ of the browser were downloadable without restrictions or cost.

By mid-1995, the World Wide Web gradually began receiving a great deal of attention in the popular culture and mass media. Netscape Navigator was the dominant and most widely used Web browser at that time, while Microsoft had just licensed Mosaic as the basis of Internet Explorer 1.0 which it released 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, shaky Web standards compliance, frequent crashes, security holes, and lots of user headaches. Internet Explorer only began to approach par with its competition with version 3.0 (1996), which offered scripting support and the market’s first commercial Cascading Style Sheets implementation.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer version 6.0 SP1 would be the last standalone version of its browser. Future enhancements would be dependent on Windows Vista, which will include new tools such as the Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML to enable developers to build extensive web applications.

As a response to this, in April 2004 the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software (although it currently only has a small desktop usage share, Opera is the third most popular browser on Windows - it is also available on other platforms, including Linux and Mac OS) joined efforts to develop new open technology standards which add more capability while remaining backwards-compatible with existing technologies. The result of this collaboration was WHATWG, a working group devoted to the fast creation of new standard definitions which will then be submitted to the W3C for approval.

In February 2005, Microsoft announced that IE 7 would be available for Windows XP SP2 and later versions of Windows by mid-2005. The announcement introduced the new version of the browser as a major upgrade over IE 6 SP1. Some believe that this decision to backport the new version of Internet Explorer to Windows XP is a move to counter the rapid growth of Mozilla Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7 was finally released in October 2006. It included features such as tabbed browsing, a search bar, and improved support for Web standards. Additionally, it included a phishing filter and a radical GUI redesign. Microsoft distributed Internet Explorer 7 to Windows users as a high priority update through Microsoft Update. Firefox 2.0, launched in late October, also included a phishing filter and GUI redesign, as well as a spelling checker for text fields and several other new features.

Not forgetting our Mac friends, Safari is Apple’s Web browser and is the third most popular Web browser in the world. KHTML was adopted by Apple for its Safari, and following KDE uses it as an API for the whole desktop. The browsers Shiira, and OmniWeb use this API named WebKit, and many Macintosh programs are adding web-browsing, which is as easy as in KDE. Camino is a popular new Mozilla-based browser for the Mac OS X platform, and competes directly with Safari, using Mac’s native Cocoa interface, instead of Mozilla’s XUL which is used in Firefox.

This thought provoking video puts all of the above into perspective.