January 10, 2011

Web Browsers

Web browsers are the software tools we all use most often to perform tasks online. There are a few different browser that make up the entire market share and we all have our favorite.

Picking a web browser for regular use is really no different than picking any software. You want to find a program that is fast and reliable and has features that make the things you do often easy and efficient.

A Little History

1991 World Wide Web (browser) is released as part of the Web development by Tim Berners-Lee.
1993 Mosaic, the first "popular" graphical browser is released.
1994 Netscape is formed by Marc Andreesen, a developer for Mosaic. Netscape is code-named Mozilla for Mosaic killer (Mosaic/Godzilla) and becomes the first commercial web browser. AOL starts offering subscribers access to the public Web.
1995 Internet Explorer is released as part of Windows 95. This starts the first big browser war.
1996 Opera, a Norwegian company, is released.
1997 AOL HAS 9 million subscribers.
1998 Mozilla, an off-shoot project/company of Netscape, is formed. Netscape source code is released as open-source.
2000 AOL has 23 million subscribers.
2002 IE has 95% of browser market share and the first browser war ends.
2003 Apple Safari is released and uses a rendering engine called WebKit, popular with mobile devices.
2004 Firefox, which is based off of the Mozilla/Netscape open-source code is released.
2006 IE 7 is released five years after IE 6 and copies many features from the main competition (Firefox).
2008 Google Chrome is released and browser war intensifies.
2010 Rockmelt, a social media browser is funded by Netscape's Marc Andreesen and based off Google's open-source project, Chromium.

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