Browser Wars v.2004: Part 1 A Long Time Ago... Lee Underwood
"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ... "
In working to develop web sites that are viewable in most browsers, it sometimes seems as if a war is going on and web site developers are standing on the sidelines. As the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) tries to set and maintain standards by which we can all live and interact on the web, browser manufacturers seem to come up short in the creation of browsers that can handle those standards. And the developers, as creators of the web sites the browsers will eventually interact with, are caught in the middle.
I don't believe the browser manufacturers are deliberately trying to cause problems for the web developers. In some cases, they have a product to sell and that takes precedence; in other cases, they are trying to do all they can to abide by the standards. Whatever the case, it tends to make life a bit difficult for those of us that have to design the web sites to interact with those browsers.
[Note: This discussion concentrates only on those browsers that operate on the Microsoft Windows platform.]
"WorldWideWeb", the first web browser (later renamed "Nexus")
In the Beginning ...
The first web browser (actually a browser/editor) was created in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. The browser was called "WorldWideweb" but was later renamed "Nexus" in order to avoid confusion between the browser itself and the cyberspace it viewed. It ran on a NeXT computer. The menu, in the upper left-hand corner, had the basic "back" and "next" options, as well as the forerunner to the ever-popular Bookmarks/Favorites list. It even handled style sheets! According to Berners-Lee, "The 'style' menu was interesting — you could load a style sheet to define how you liked your documents rendered. You could also set the paragraph style to an HTML element's style — since lists didn't nest, the user could think of the process as styles (heading1, heading 2, list element, etc.), and then this implied an HTML structure when the document was written back." Berners-Lee is currently serving as Director of the W3C. When it comes to knowing what standards are needed for the web, he's in the right place.
Nexus eventually gave way to a wide variety of web browsers, some of which have been able to weather the years and evolution of the internet, while others have long since disappeared. Of the ones that have remained, two – Internet Explorer and Netscape – have dominated the browser wars for many years. And in the last few years, several other browsers – Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Firebird, and a few others – have managed to gain a foothold in the browser market, albeit a small one.
