The Internet war

Did you ever wonder how browsers came into existence? How did people discover the World Wide Web back in the day? Welcome to TechLegends, a series of articles with which I intend to shed light on the old forgotten tech of the past, without which the world we live in today would be a myth.

In today’s article, we will take a look at Netscape Navigator, the browser that started it all. How it reached the pinnacle of the world of web browsers, how it was dethroned, and how it still seeks revenge today in another form.

In the early days of the existence of the internet, There was no standard way of accessing webpages. This all changed however with the introduction of Mosaic, a web browser for early windows, macintosh and Unix computers. Seeing the commercial benefit of this software, Spyglass Inc. licensed it from the University of
Illinois for commercial use. The creator of this browser was a Student of the University of Illinois named Marc Andreessen. He too seeing this commercial
opportunity created a company called Netscape Communications.

It didn’t take long for Netscape Navigator to dominate the web browser market. Other competitors could not catch up as they spent so much time replicating the features of the latest release of Netscape Navigator that, by the time they finished adding these new features, Netscape was already releasing its next major update. Netscape Navigator was internally referred to as the Mosaic Killer or Mozilla.

But eventually, a company with big enough resources and developers to catch upto Netscape arrived on the Horizon. Microsoft, had tried to get the source code from Mosaic and make their own web browser. And although the first 1-2 versions were bad compared to Netscape, By the 3rd Iteration, Internet Explorer had caught up to Netscape Navigator.

Bit by bit, IE started eating into the market share. It also had an unfair advantage over netscape as it was bundled with every release of windows, which was the most popular operating system at that time and even now.

By the late 1990s, Netscape Navigator market share was technically non existent, and they were bought by AOL, the premiere Internet Service Provider company.
But, as a last ditch effort, right before being bought by AOL, netscape navigator code was made open source. It was posted on a website called Mozilla.org,
where open source developers laid out a development roadmap to optimize the code for modern Web browsing uses and just like that, from the ashes of
Netscape Navigator, arose the browser we all know and love Mozilla Firefox.

P.S. Microsoft was so busy trying to beat netscape navigator in the web browser market that Google Chrome slipped under their nose and became the No.1
browser of the world :-)

SS Karthiik
Writer and Web developer
Philomath Team