next: so why not all use one browser?
The Browser Wars
(August 2002)
The First Browser War
The World Wide Web is still a very young medium. Its growth so far has been phenomenal, and it has become central to the lives of many people. However, the web as we know it is barely twelve years old. Most of the people who now use it have been doing so for less than five years. In historical terms, that is nothing. The web isn't even a teenager yet. Its story has barely begun.
The first battle of the "browser war", the fight over the new users during this phase of explosive growth, is now pretty much over as far as the English-speaking world is concerned. It ended some time ago. Web use continues to grow, but there will never be the same avalanche of new users. Internet Explorer "won" that battle, possibly by illegal or immoral means, but I won't get into that argument here. In many ways, though, the main loser was not Netscape, but the web itself.
At the height of this first browser war, both of the version 4.0 browsers were released with myriad proprietary extensions to HTML, differing methods of producing "DHTML" and numerous misintepretations or outright bugs in their implementations of what have become core web technologies.
These non-standard extensions allowed web authors to do cool, whizzy effects on their pages, which many did, often just because they were cool and whizzy. However, the two main browsers were not terribly compatible with each other, so authors either had to neglect a portion of their audience ("best viewed with..."), or spend ages coding everything twice.
The misinterpretations and bugs meant that similar problems applied if web authors wanted to use labour-saving technologies like CSS. So everything had to be tested in the two main browsers, and compromises or workarounds reached that produced acceptable results. Given the huge differences between the two browsers, this involved lots of work. Again, users of other browsers either got ignored, or caught in the crossfire.
Needless to say, many people who write web pages for a living were not amused by all this extra work they had to do.
There was a dream. A dream of a web where you could write a web page once, and everyone would be able to read it.