The Browser Wars: A Legend of Over a Decade Continues

On April 22, 1993, a group of students from the University of Illinois invented a program designed to retrieve information from various public networks. Few people at the time could have foreseen that this program, called Mosaic, would fundamentally change our daily lives. In 1994, Netscape acquired Mosaic and launched Netscape Communications in April 1994. Quickly, Netscape earned widespread praise for its powerful features and user-friendly interface. Following Microsoft's release of Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, the Internet experienced rapid growth over the next few months, and Netscape capitalized on this momentum to capture more than 70% of the market share (note: at that time, Netscape was a paid software). However, the good times didn't last long. With the release of Microsoft’s free bundled IE 3.0, the curtain rose on an intense and fiercely contested battle for dominance in the browser market.

Here, we document the largest and most spectacular battles in the historical Browser Wars.