Internet Browsing

Description

History
Main article: History of the web browser
The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development, and is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation. His browser was called WorldWideWeb and later renamed Nexus.[5]


Marc Andreessen, inventor of Netscape Navigator
The first commonly available web browser with a graphical user interface was Erwise. The development of Erwise was initiated by Robert Cailliau.

In 1993, browser software was further innovated by Marc Andreessen with the release of Mosaic, "the world's first popular browser",[6] which made the World Wide Web system easy to use and more accessible to the average person. Andreesen's browser sparked the internet boom of the 1990s.[6] The introduction of Mosaic in 1993 – one of the first graphical web browsers – led to an explosion in web use. Andreessen, the leader of the Mosaic team at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), soon started his own company, named Netscape, and released the Mosaic-influenced Netscape Navigator in 1994, which quickly became the world's most popular browser, accounting for 90% of all web use at its peak (see usage share of web browsers).

Microsoft responded with it Internet Explorer in 1995, also heavily influenced by Mosaic, initiating the industry's first browser war. Bundled with Windows, Internet Explorer gained dominance in the web browser market; Internet Explorer usage share peaked at over 95% by 2002.[7]


WorldWideWeb for NeXT, released in 1991, was the first web browser.[8]
Opera debuted in 1996; it has never achieved widespread use, having less than 2% browser usage share as of February 2012 according to Net Applications.[9] Its Mini version has an additive share, in April 2011 amounting to 1.1% of overall browser use, but focused on the fast-growing mobile phone web browser market, being preinstalled on over 40 million phones. It is also available on several other embedded systems, including Nintendo's Wii video game console.

In 1998, Netscape launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive browser using the open source software model. That browser would eventually evolve into Firefox, which developed a respectable following while still in the beta stage of development; shortly after the release of Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, Firefox (all versions) accounted for 7% of browser use.[7] As of August 2011, Firefox has a 28% usage share.[9]

Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003; as of April 2011, it had a dominant share of Apple-based web browsing, accounting for just over 7% of the entire browser market.[9]

The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Chrome, first released in September 2008. Chrome's take-up has increased significantly year by year, by doubling its usage share from 8% to 16% by August 2011. This increase seems largely to be at the expense of Internet Explorer, whose share has tended to decrease from month to month.[10] In December 2011, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer 8 as the most widely used web browser but still had lower usage than all versions of Internet Explorer combined.[11] Chrome's user-base continued to grow and in May 2012, Chrome's usage passed the usage of all versions of Internet Explorer combined.[12] By April 2014, Chrome's usage had hit 45%.[13]

Internet Explorer was deprecated in Windows 10, with Microsoft Edge replacing it as the default web browser.[14]

Business models

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The ways that web browser makers fund their development costs has changed over time. The first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was a research project.

In addition to being freeware, Netscape Navigator and Opera were also sold commercially.

Internet Explorer, on the other hand, was bundled free with the Windows operating system (and was also downloadable free), and therefore it was funded partly by the sales of Windows to computer manufacturers and direct to users. Internet Explorer also used to be available for the Mac. It is likely that releasing IE for the Mac was part of Microsoft's overall strategy to fight threats to its quasi-monopoly platform dominance – threats such as web standards and Java – by making some web developers, or at least their managers, assume that there was "no need" to develop for anything other than Internet Explorer. In this respect, IE may have contributed to Windows and Microsoft applications sales in another way, through "lock-in" to Microsoft's browser.

In January 2009, the European Commission announced it would investigate the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows operating systems from Microsoft, saying "Microsoft's tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice." Microsoft Corp v Commission[15][16]

Safari and Mobile Safari were likewise always included with macOS and iOS respectively, so, similarly, they were originally funded by sales of Apple computers and mobile devices, and formed part of the overall Apple experience to customers.

Some commercial web browsers are paid by search engine companies to make their engine default, or to include them as another option. For example, Yahoo! pays Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, to make Yahoo! Search the default search engine in Firefox. Mozilla makes enough money from this deal that it does not need to charge users for Firefox. By virtue of common ownership, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome default to their respective vendors' own search engines, Bing and Google Search, and may integrate with other platforms offered by the vendor. This encourages the use of their first-party services, which in turn, exposes users to advertising that can be used as a source of revenue.

Many less-well-known free software browsers, such as Konqueror, were hardly funded at all and were developed mostly by volunteers free of charge.