On this page you will learn about the World Wide Web history. Ready? Click the button below to open the summary, and use the bar menu to find more about the aim of this page, the degree course and the author behind it all.
The World Wide Web (a.k.a. the most famous triplet of "Ws")
was born in 1989 from Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau's minds, in Geneva, Switzerland.
It all started when the two CERN scientists designed a system for sharing and distributing
scientific papers; they based their idea on the use of HTML and SGML. Then, in 1991, they presented the very first
"WWW" prototype, which unfortunately was not successful. On August 6th, this one was the first webpage ever.
The first War of browsers (1995-1999)
The First War of browsers was between Netscape and Microsoft.
It all started when they both introduced more and more updates and improvements; the idea was to affect users’ browser choice
The «winner» of the first war of browser has been Microsoft, which included its browser Internet
Explorer 3, within the Windows 95 operating system.
Hence the users found out an already installed browser and most of them started using it and they did not change it.
The Internet Explorer era (1999-2004)
Without an actual competitor.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 has been released in September 2001:it was fast, standard-compliant, well-supported. From 2006 and 2012, only 4
versions have been released, similar to that version.
the IE development did not introduce any significant innovation.
A new war of browsers started, where IE totally failed, loosing its domain, programmers kept it installed just to support tests while designing and developing their web sites.
The second War of browsers (2004-2008)
MOZ-FF vs MSIE vs Others
since 2004 a new stripped-down browser-only version of the full suite, which included new features such as a separate search bar (which had previously only appeared in the Opera browser), had been created. The browser-only version was named Firefox. This browser became the focus of the Mozilla Foundation's development efforts and Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004.
In April 2004, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software joined efforts to develop new open-technology standards which add more capability while remaining backward-compatible with existing technologies. The result of this collaboration was the WHATWG, a working group devoted to the fast creation of new standard definitions that would be submitted to the W3C for approval.
Microsoft rejected to join the WHAT working group in 2004, following decisions made by the other companies, instead of leading them. Also, Apple has got a more dominant position, with more constructive actions, together with Firefox and Opera, refocusing discussions on the browsers
End of second war, Chrome won!
By 2017 usage shares of Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer fell well below 5% each, while Google Chrome had expanded to over 60% worldwide. In May 2017, Andreas Gal, former Mozilla Chief technology officer, publicly stated that Google Chrome won the Second Browser War.
The browsers today
Browser diffusion.
In 2008, Google released Chrome a couple of years later it became the most diffused browser,overcoming IE The diffusion of the browser installed on Tablets and smartphones came into the scene.
In June 2021, Microsoft permanently discontinued Internet Explorer, in favor of Microsoft Edge as their sole browser.
By the end of 2021 Chrome has maintained its first position by increasing its percentage of usage till around 65% .. 70%. Safari has gained the second position (9% to 20%) whereas Firefox has dropped to fourth position (around 8%) in world wide browser market of desktop computers (tablet and mobile devices have other browser versions and statistics).
The goal of this website is to deliver free information about a selected topic of the "web and mobile systems" course. Created for academic purposes only.
