A brief history of browsers from document display to AI integration

A browser is a gateway to the internet. Initially browsers were software programs but in today’s multi-device world, they have evolved almost to become operating-systems in their own right.

Between 1990 and 1994, there were 3 key browsers that just displayed documents and text - the WorldWideWeb, renamed as Nexus to differentiate it from the internet or the World Wide Web, was created by Tim Berners-Lee. Lynx and Mosaic were browsers that emerged, with Mosaic reading both text and graphics.

The early browsers were not open-source and were locked into the parent company’s operating systems. Nexus, worked on the NeXT computers at CERN a particle-physics research institute, where it was developed.

Mosaic by NCSA - the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, was open source for non-commercial use.

In 1994-1996 three new entrants Netscape’s Navigator, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Opera, in that order came into the market.

Netscape’s entrance was via the formation of a breakaway group called the NCSA kids from Mosaic.

Initially called Mosaic Communications, a successful lawsuit resulted in the name change to Netscape Navigator. And the first “branded” browser entered the market.

The success of Netscape, which had ninety per cent of the market share at the time, resulted in Microsoft making huge investments in its own browser, Internet Explorer (IE) and in four years, embedded IE into the Windows 95 operating system. This practically wiped Netscape out of the market.

This tussle between Netscape Navigator and IE, is often reffered to as “the browser wars”.

In 1998, Netscape was taken over by AOL. The browser data became open source and the Mozilla project was created, resulting in the formation of the Mozilla Foundation in 2003. Mozilla’s Firefox was built on the ashes of Netscape Navigator, which ceased to exist in 2007.

As an open-source browser, Firefox rapidly gained popularity as IE and Safari, created to work with the Apple operating system, in 2003 were both closed source.

Surprisingly it was only in 2008, that google Chrome entered the market as a contender to the open-source model.

Opera continued to chug along, favored by some with Opera-mini introduced in 2011.

Browser wars continued with Chrome rapidly becoming the market favourite, while Safari runs a close second. Firefox, while popular, shares some of the remainder of the market with IE, which was rebranded as Edge in 2015, with renewed investment from Microsoft to re-enter the fray.

In 2024, new entrants like DuckDuckGo, favoured for privacy, Brave noted for its web security and Ecosia a browser with green credentials are some of the options in the browser market still largely dominated by Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Opera and the others operating with very small market shares.

In 2024, Google Chrome launched Gemini, its answer to how to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its Chrome browser.

AI is used to analyse information that google collects and indexes from its search engine. Users are able to interrogate this information with natural language and voice commands in multiple languages.

Browsers today have come a long way with Chrome, Safari, Firefox and to a lesser extend Edge still dominating the browser markets.

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