Once upon a time, a rather clever chap by the name of Tim Berners Lee came up with the concept of the World Wide Web. At the time the world was still only just acquainted with email and computer networks, even dial-up internet access was only for the technical elite, so any mention of webs usually only conjured up thoughts of creepy crawlies. These were the days when the only web browser available was NCSA Mosaic, concepts such as inline graphics and different typefaces were revolutionary and ideas like Cascading Style Sheets and Macromedia Flash weren’t even thought of.
For a year or so, the world bumbled along with Mosaic and everyone was content. Then a new kid appeared on the block, Netscape introduced different typefaces and background images, and in later revisions tables and frames appeared. All of a sudden, Mosaic was passé and Netscape ruled the roost. For the next few years, Netscape’s dominance was total, and Microsoft considered the Internet, with the World Wide Web in particular, to be a passing fad.
This was until the World Wide Web demonstrated itself to be more than a passing fad. In an apparent U-turn of significant proportions, Microsoft poured vast resources into its own web browser, Internet Explorer, and gave it away with every copy of Windows it sold. Now most people are just interested in accessing the web with as little hassle as possible, and so instead of having to download an internet browser from Netscape, they’d use IE. IE was already installed and was ready to go. It didn’t matter that IE wasn’t possibly the best tool for the job, all that mattered was that it was there and it was free.
The next couple of years saw a fierce browser battle, with Netscape’s share of the web browser market fade from almost a monopoly, to such a small portion that most people hadn’t even heard of it and doom loomed over its future. Then AOL bought Netscape and IE emerged victorious. AOL’s mismanagement of Netscape led to its further demise, until it finally made the source code for Netscape open source in a final last ditch attempt to breath life into it.
Another couple of years passed and it looked like IE was the only player in town, but this position, as well as its patchy development history, meant it was vulnerable to security breaches, and boy was it vulnerable. However, in the background, the Mozilla Organisation had been working on the, now open, source code from Netscape and had made it leaner and meaner. Almost as if out of nowhere, a credible alternative to IE now exists in the form of Firefox, arising from the ashes of Netscape, and from recent reports, it looks like a new browser battle might just be starting. Why not give it a try?