Once the HTML standard was set, every company started developing web browsers and the battle for market domination was fierce. By 1995, no fewer than 14 browsers were available to the public for use on a number of different operating systems.
Two of these browsers, Mosaic and Internet Explorer, would go on to characterise an era of the Internet dubbed “the First Browser Wars”. Mosaic, written by talented developer Marc Andreessen, quickly rose to the top of the pack with over 80% market share. Microsoft, seeing they had missed the wave, decided to license Mosaic internals and released their first browser as Internet Explorer.
Their subsequent versions were written internally and the battle lines were drawn. Combat raged for the next two years with each party releasing new version of their browsers with astounding regularity. Mosaic morphed into, first, Netscape Navigator and then Netscape Communicator, while IE relentlessly increased in version number.
The tide eventually turned in favour of Microsoft when they released their version 4 of IE. This was the first version to be “integrated” with their Windows operating system and spelt death for competing browsers.
To celebrate their impending victory, a group of drunk Microsoft employees took the 10 foot high “e” logo from the IE4 launch party and left it in the fountain in front of the Netscape headquarters. Netscape employees retaliated by placing a Netscape logo standing on the IE logo, but it was a futile gesture—Netscape began to lose market share dramatically, and was almost completely gone just 5 years later.
