A brief, bitter & slightly sarcastic history of the web browser

In the beginning were the dinosaurs: Erwise, Cello, Mosaic, Lynx and things. Nobody under 40 remembers them and they're all long extinct. Everyone used Mosaic anyway, which was FOSS from the NCSA.

Nobody's heard of the NCSA any more, which is a shame as they also gave the world Apache and without them there wouldn't be a Web. They made something useful out of Tim Berners-Lee's work at CERN, but timbl and CERN are far more famous.

Odd, really, that neither CERN nor the NCSA ostensibly have anything to do with the Internet.

Mosaic begat loads of different browsers. All were also called Mosaic. Many were proprietary, "enhanced" versions, which actually weren't.

Only one was any good. Called - surprise! - Mosaic, it came from a company also called Mosaic. (Are you following all this?) Developed under the codename "Mozilla" - the Godzilla of Mosaics, you see - it was Mosaic with embedded pictures and FTP and cool stuff like that. Hey, it was 1994. People complained about the confusing name so the company renamed itself Netscape and renamed their browser Netscape as well, which isn't confusing at all. It was shareware, vastly successful, created the original 1990s Web and was killed off by Microsoft giving Internet Explorer away for free.

But as Ben Goldacre likes to say so much that he has put it on a T-shirt: "I think you'll find it's a little more complicated than that."

For starters, IE 1 was an optional extra for Windows 95, you had to buy it, and it was utterly crap. IE, incidentally, is also based on Mosaic, via Spyglass. MICROS~1 didn't write IE themselves, they just bought it in. You'd be surprised how many "Microsoft" products were not actually written by Microsoft: Powerpoint, Visual Basic, SQL Server, Defender, Frontpage, Mail and lots of others.

IE2 was free, but still rubbish. So was IE3.

So everyone used Netscape. A few even paid for it and Netscape Inc did tremendously well. This pissed off Microsoft, who don't really like anyone else making big money off their platform. So they worked away on IE until eventually, after about four versions, it was actually just about usable, kinda sorta ish.

And it was freeware.

Netscape wasn't, officially. It went through various stages, including being free only for non-profits and educational institutions, but it ended up proprietary, closed-source shareware. Home and non-commercial or non-profit use was free, businesses were meant to buy licences. Which most didn't.

It went through a whole bunch of versions, all of which were market-leaders in their time.

Netscape 1 was just a browser.

Netscape 2 added an email client and USENET news-reader. Not RSS, what we call a news-reader today, that hadn't been invented yet. Netscape 2 was a fair bit bigger than Netscape 1.

Netscape 3 Gold added web-page editing too. It was bigger still.

Netscape 4 sort of forked, internally: there was Netscape Communicator, a suite including a browser + email + news + address book + web editor + a proprietary shared diary - a huge app for the times,

And separately, there was Netscape Navigator, which was just a browser once again and thus was relatively svelte and quick - so naturally it never got updated past 4.0.x.

In the end, once IE was usable enough, everyone used that instead. Netscape Communicator was big, sluggish, took loads of memory and was inefficient - and it cost money. For instance, every time the window was resized, it re-rendered the entire page, as the rendering engine built a static page display for the current window dimensions. This was at the time when live window resizing was a trendy new feature of Windows - it was an extra in the same Plus! pack for Windows 95 that introduced IE to an indifferent world, and had even been retro-fitted on to MacOS 8.

Netscape complained that IE, a rival for their commercial product, was being given away for free - which counts as illegal restraint of trade. In response, MICROS~1 just bundled it with Windows and blithely claimed it had always been there, even though it wasn't in Windows 95 or Windows NT 3 and they also offered it for Mac and Unix. The US Department of Justice, remarkably, swallowed this, even though it was demonstrably utter bollocks, and let MICROS~1 off.

When Netscape Corp was bought out by AOL and broken up, the company's last act was to make the as-yet-unfinished Communicator 5 open source under its original codename of Mozilla.

After more than two years of work, this eventually became the Mozilla Application Suite, also the basis for AOL's Netscape 6 and 7. Netscape 6 was based on the unfinished Mozilla 0.6 code, and Netscape 7 on the final but unpolished Mozilla 1.0. AOL then outsourced it; Netscape 8 was based on Firefox 1 and Netscape 9 on Firefox 2. All were freeware; Mozilla itself was FOSS.

Mozilla was the Linux browser. It was the best FOSS browser, but that was because it was also pretty much the only FOSS browser. It was also a huge big lumbering thing, like Communicator before it, and it was unpopular on Windows and Mac (although I used it myself, as I am not a big Microsoft fan, as you might have worked out.)

Then Dave Hyatt and some mates, including a chap called Ben Goodger, stripped Mozilla down to just a browser, reinventing Navigator as if it were a new concept. They called it Mozilla Phoenix. Rising from the ashes, you see.

Phoenix the BIOS people complained.

They renamed it Firebird.

Firebird the FOSS database people complained.

They renamed it Firefox, which is a made-up word and obscure enough that nobody minded. It did brilliantly and still is today. The Mozilla Foundation consequently abandoned the Mozilla Internet Suite. The legendary open-source community took it up, renamed it Seamonkey and it's still updated. I still use it occasionally myself. It's OK. It hasn't lost any weight, but the relentless advance of computer technology means that it's no biggie any more.

Firefox is now under some threat from Google Chrome (one of whose developers being a certain Ben Goodger). Chrome is based on Apple's Webkit but with a better UI than Safari (a project headed, amongst others, by one Dave Hyatt). Webkit is Apple's cleaned-up, enhanced version of KDE's KHTML rendering library from the Konqueror browser. Webkit is so much better that KDE have given up on KHTML and now use Webkit too.

Now there are basically four main families of browser:

Internet Explorer. Windows-only nowadays, but to most people, IE is The Internet. IE6 sucks bigtime, but tons of big companies are wedded to it, so it shambles on, undead. I suppose that makes it a sort of zombie used by dinosaurs, which actually sounds kind of cool. IE 7 and 8 are sort of OK, if you're the sort of person who doesn't mind sharing needles with strangers.

Mozilla, AKA Firefox, Seamonkey, Camino and loads of others.

Both, ironically, while being lifelong bitter rivals, are descended from Mosaic.

Then there's Webkit, AKA KHTML, AKA Chrome, Safari, Konqueror, the Nokia Symbian browser and others. It was developed from scratch in the late 1990s.

And Opera, doing its own idiosyncratic thing for seventeen years. "MultiTorg" coexisted with Mosaic back when giants walked the Earth.