The pioneer in this field was a browser with a graphical editor – NCSA Mosaic. The initial code of this program was publicly available and many browsers adopted it. These are world-famous browsers – Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. This program had its drawbacks, but subsequent browsers, particularly Netscape Navigator, eliminated them.
Netscape developed Netscape Navigator for operating systems such as UNIX, Windows, Mac OS, which later led to enormous success and substantial profits. This prompted Microsoft to release its own browser, Internet Explorer. The final blow to the competitors' business was the inclusion of the program in Windows. Thus, the browser became an addition to the operating system. Moreover, Microsoft added HTML extensions to its program that were incompatible with standards. All this led to fierce competition among browsers, which ended with Microsoft nearly monopolizing the market.
After losing the market, Netscape's revenues significantly declined, and the company was bought by AOL. The browser's code was released under the free Mozilla Public License, abbreviated as MPL. As a result, the well-known Mozilla Firefox was created.
The market takeover by IE led to new consequences. Microsoft stopped developing the browser; versions 4 and 6 did not receive improvements, and the speed of operation and site search decreased. The latest versions of Internet Explorer try to fill this gap.
The appearance of the Opera program dates back to 1995. Initially, the browser was distributed as shareware. This allowed it to gain huge popularity in post-Soviet countries and low traffic in many other countries. However, from 2005, the browser switched to a free version. In the beginning, this browser worked quickly and stably, so there was no need to clear the cache.
In 2005, Google released its brainchild – Chrome, which was based on the independent project Chromium. The browser is equipped with some innovations – the 'incognito' function, crash detection, and other useful features.
In 2009, Microsoft announced that it was preparing to launch a new browser called Gazelle. The new program will operate on the principle of information separation, which is used by operating systems for a large number of users, which, according to Microsoft, will improve security.
Based on materials from the blog Chinese SOE – http://anokalintik.ru/.
_