The browsers we use
You would probably be using a web browser, to view this page right? but do you know the history of it? how it all got started?How this "internet" phenomenon has taken over the world by storm, due to the introduction of web browsers, that give us access to all new worlds every time you browse.The internet is not a single entity, to owned by some CEO, it's a global phenomenon, and perhaps the most used public utility in the history of mankind.The concept of sharing data over internet, the concept of a world wide web, that could interconnect these two concepts, all these things happened in different places, in different timelines, but has yielded one of the powerful tool, to obtain knowledge.
The early days
The first browser, was created by Tim Berners-Lee.He was the brains behind the invention of the World Wide Web or WWW as we know it today .In 1990,Berners-Lee created, what is assumed to be the first browser, he called it ‘Nexus’,but he initially called it world wide web, but that was too elaborate for a name of a product.Uniform Resource Locator or URL helped people brows through specific servers, using the http or ftp or local file access.The program for this browser was wrote in a NEXT pc, which was at that time a rival company of apple, run by the current CEO of apple- Steve Jobs.It included the first ever, user friendly toolbars and menu and buttons, ranging from the file menu to the forward and backward button.
The browser also allowed user to set styles for the way pages will be rendered and shown to the user.An rather controversial information is that the NEXT systems claim that the close button - 'x' was unique to the NEXT systems and it was copied by the windows designers and programmers.
But Internet was not so popular, until people started using it to share information.When the people realised the potential, they wanted something more than the Nexus.Also the NEXT systems was bought by apple, and Steve Jobs rejoined apple corporation.Hence the Nexus was dropped.This gave Microsoft the opportunity to build their own web browser.But another company was already building web browsers-Netscape navigator(we will come to this later..).
Birth of IE
The first version of Internet Explorer debuted with the second version of Microsoft Windows 95 that was called.Windows 95 did contain the supporting packages to connect to internet, like the TCP/IP and other such packages, yet there was not browser dedicated to windows, this meant people had to opt for Netscape.This is the reason Microsoft built their own browser, Microsoft suddenly realised the potential of bundling in its own browser and thus Internet Explorer (IE) was born.
The second version of Internet Explorer obviously V2.0 arrived in November 1995 and was the first cross platform browser meaning it can work on both windows based system and in Macintosh PC.The second version provided SSL technology(the technology to secure data over the internet) also the browser supported cookies, VRML, and Internet newsgroups. Year by year, with the growing potential of internet, Microsoft was determined to tap the resources, it launched the next big Microsoft browser -Internet Explorer 3.0 in August 1996, which had a completely rebuilt core and considered one of the best browsers of the time.
This browser was designed for Windows 95 and included features that users immediately took to such as Internet Mail and News 1.0 and Windows Address Book.Internet Explorer could now display GIF and JPG files, play MIDI sound files and streaming audio files without the assistance of other applications or plugins. And then came Internet Explorer 4 in 1997 and was designed for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. Another major add-on to the release of IE4 was Outlook Express( but obviously most of us have not yet known the full potential of outlook express), which would be installed in the default installation as an upgrade to the previous news and mail options. And this was the first browser from Microsoft that could compete with Netscape Communicator .
This was also a major release for Web programmers since the introduction of DHTML as a scripting language in IE4( try www.dynamicdrive.com),Now people could get reactions from the browser's rendering engine for mouse gestures like mouse click, mouse over, colors, font styles, button styles, new types of lists, etc.,rather than being a boring static page, now the web pages seemed more dynamic, intriguing and fun. In September 1998, Internet Explorer 5 was released. DHTML functionality was improved with more features and with emerging Web commerce ideas. Internet Explorer 6 was first released in 2001 with the release of Windows XP operating system.
One of the major improvements in IE6 was the implementation of privacy and security functionality of the browser.Now we have IE8, which offers new address bars(similar to Firefox) and a whole new search and retrieve features that are still addons in other browsers and it offers support to Silverlight, a features like private browsing, multi-tabs,etc.,.The famous logo - the 'e' with an arrow around it has been in the Mac PCs also for sometime, when Netscape and Microsoft were competing, but after the failure of Netscape, IE seemed to be prominent, until Apple proved their worth when they came up with their own browser called the 'Safari'.
The Navigator
For those who haven't used internet at the stage, when MS paint was the only graphic program to 'create' art would not know the once famous browser Netscape navigator.I remember that I had troubles using Navigator after using IE, since both were miles apart from each other in terms of user interface and tools offered.Netscape started out as collaboration between Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen to form Mosaic Communications.The mosaic communications was the one that was later changed to Netscape communications.With the advent of the Internet(initially ARPA net),they saw the potential of internet and knew that browsers would be the primary tool to access it.
Hence making a Web-browsing software is a huge potential for making money.people from the Mosaic project were working for Netscape, and Netscape was released to the public in December 1994( this was before the launch of IE). The Netscape navigator received accolades world wide, mainly due to the frequency in which they were offering updated content of the software. New innovations and improvements were constantly being made to the browser and that made it the popular browser to browse the Internet with .By the year 1995, Netscape dominated the browser industry and became the lead player in the market.But the browser itself led to the down fall of Netscape communications company.With windows 95, Microsoft launched their own version of web browser.
IE was the only equal contender at that time.Also Microsoft was making Operating system for a living, hence making a browser and getting better at it was easy for them.But initially with IE versions 1 and 2, Microsoft was the second favorite, and Netscape was still the lead player.But Microsoft had it's advantages.One is that they were having a far more global reach than the Netscape communications and the IE was bundled along with the OS as a freeware.Hence Microsoft had an edge over Netscape in terms of strategy.In 1996, to counteract Microsoft's attempt, Netscape Navigator 2 was launched with a whole new sets of features(java, plugins,etc.,) that will help it stand out of the crowd, they even launched a free version of Netscape for students, researchers, etc(but not to all).By the end of 1996, both Netscape navigator and IE launched their 3rd versions of the browser.Microsoft was soon catching up with the guys at Netscape.Netscape 3 gave a benchmark to all other browsers, if you are going to create a browser, you would include the features offered by Netscape 3.
But in 1997 Netscape 4 was released and IE 4 was released in October of same year.This is where disaster started for Netscape.Both the browsers (in their 3rd version) offered different scripting and rendering for DHTML, CSS,etc.,Hence website that were compatible with IE was not compatible with Netscape and vice versa. Microsoft, being a more experienced player, started to build a browser from scratch, they went on to change the core programming for IE4.But Netscape on the other hand, managed to build more features on the already faulty V 3.0 browser.Another factor was the ease of coding- IE offered much better implementation of DHTML and other scripts while Netscape still offered tedious ways to render pages by it's browser.By 1997 , there was a boom in the sales of PCs.People began realising the importance of a PC and the sales skyrocketed.With the increased sales of PCs, the demand for internet also increased.Most of the people who bought the PCs were commoners, hence they needed tools ready to connect them to the internet.Also Microsoft windows was by far the most commonly used OS at the time, and Microsoft having given the IE as freeware along with it's OS, IE4 became an instant hit.
The browser bussiness seemed to end for Netscape, hence as an attempt to increase the popularity, finally Netscape offered the software as a freeware.But the Netscape 4 was already faulty and people did not want to use it.As a final attempt, they announced that the Netscape browser will become an open source.But this step also did not result in saving the company.People were least interested in developing a Browser that contained a lot of bugs.Also at that time around, there were not many programmers who would dedicate themselves in developing a open source project.But having given the code as open source, Netscape created a new path for a rather popular browsers we use today.We can see the tabbed browsing, which originally belonged to Netscape in this browser-Firefox( we will see about Firefox later since I'm following chronological order).
The Opera
Next comes the famous browser -Opera. The Opera browser was started in 1994 as a research project in Norway’s telecom company .Two engineers from the same company developed the browser Opera for the company’s intranet. Opera was written from scratch and was not based on any other browser's core technology. This gives it some unique browsing features such as page zoom, a multi-document interface browsing environment and mouse gestures.It was lite, fast and offered impressive feature set, with great support for HTML, XML, WML, CSS, JavaScript,etc.,.
But Opera version 1 was not released to the public, it was rather created for the company's own use.But the first public version of Opera was the version 2 and the subsequent V3 was the first to be accepted worldwide. Version 3.62 was the first version of Opera in terms of features, stability and speed.
CSS support was exceptional in this version of Opera. Opera Beta 4 was released in March 2000 and had support for most of CSS2, all of CSS1, HTML4, XML, and WML. This version was based on a cross-platform core and facilitated the release of Opera for different Operating Systems. A new integrated e-mail client was also included in this version.The Opera 5 release was noticed by the general public, since this time the browser was not on a given to public on a trial basis,but was ad supported.Hence people could use the browser long after the trial period. Then came the Opera 6 series ,which was one of the most stable and it was with this release that Opera that Opera became a threat to other companies in the Industry.
In early 2003 Opera launched it's seventh impimentation -Opera v7 this features an all new rendering engine, that enabled the browser to render even for smaller resolutions hence be used for hand held devices and smaller screens.The interface, the menus, the theme, etc., were changed, that increased the look of the browser and made it appealing for the general public also the new browser features new shortcuts for various tasks, plugins.It also finally integrated a news feed and other new features like note making, sidebars with tools, etc.,Opera is now onle of the strong contenders in the Browser industry.And it is the widely used browser in handheld devices like mobile phones, PDA, etc.,The latest version is Opera 10, that is faster and safer, with new features such as speed dials, mouse gestures, quick find,saving sessions and passwords, new User Interface,etc.,
Open-Firefox
We next come to the Browser of the hour-Firefox.One of the most successful browser, that captured people world wide, in a very short time.But did you know that Firefox began not as Firefox, but as Phoenix?.Yes the name of Firefox, as we know now was Phoenix in the year 2002.The first version of it, was not distributed as a setup, rather it was an executable itself.That made the browser very lite in terms of memory usage and even though it was still very small when compared to other browsers in terms of features, yet it offered certain things that were not offered by other browsers at that time.Like tabbed browsing, built-in download manager and the best part was it was open source.Phoenix 2 was released in the same year and the same month!.
This new verison had shortcuts enabled for different actions, a new toolbar and a sidebar for other tools, also it offered the user many customisation options like enabling and disabling java when needed.And a whole new feature was it enabled users to install add-ons and themes for the browser.Hence the browser became visually appealing(who wouldn't want a browser with cool graphics!).
The third version of Phoenix did not offer much and was rather full of bugs.Also the team at Mozilla were forced to change the name of Phoenix to Firebird since there was some trade-mart issues regarding the name.But this name also would not stand for long, the version of Fire bird that came out was full of bugs too, but offered a solution of sending a report of the bug to the developers so that they can rectify the error.Having given the option to trace bugs, the Mozilla team was ready to launch it's next bug free browser, bu there was still a problem with the browser's name.Firebird was the name of an open source development project that makes a relational database .
Hence to avoid the legal problems, they researched thoroughly and cam up with the name Firefox,with the new name came a new logo ,the famous image of the Flaming Red Fox wrapped around the Globe. The next version released ,featured as an installer(all the previous versions were direct exe).The theme, the other features remained the same, but allowed users to install the required features only also it was now almost bug free.The later version was Firefox 0.10 which was the first browser to implement the RSS technology(these days all prominent website offers RSS feeds).
All this time the developers at Mozilla were giving the name with versions next to the decimal as 0.x It was in 2004, that finally the 1.0 Version was released(this is the reason why FireFox is still in 3.x version while others have gone to 7.x or 8.x)the V1.0 had support for multiple languages. People were waiting for this release, since at the time of release, Firefox was the most downloaded one- it reached a peak download count of 1 million in a day! OMG!.The latest version is Firefox 3.5.3(still the developers are going at decimal places!)In this version they claim they have zoomed the speed of the browser- with the tag-line"fast faster fastest" like other browsers it also offers private browsing, new enhanced customisation options, addons capability and more security by detecting harmful sites.
The Safari
The next browser that we are going to see is more dedicated to the Mac users rather than users of other platform (something similar in context to IE). The Mac PCs have always been in the wish-list of general public, but wouldn't opt one for daily tasks, but there are users who like Mac and use them for their work or daily tasks.Beofre Safari, IE was the browser that was available with the operating system, but after it's debut in 2003, Safari toppled Internet Explorer.Also since the Safari was developed by the Apple team itself, they bundled the software with the consequent editions of the OS, from then on, Safari is the default browser that comes with the Mac OS.
Safari uses Apple’s WebKit application framework for rendering Web pages and for running JavaScript. The Safari browser is a delight to use. It has a bookmark management scheme, contains the integrated Apple Quick time multimedia technology (obviously!) and also features tabbed browsing.Unlike other browsers that offer speed dial for most visited pages, Safari offers the same in it's own flip style.The Google search engine box is the default search engine for the
browser.It also includes a private browsing mode (which does not record any information of your Web visit) and Parental Controls.They have made sure that Safari is also a cross platform browser, hence people with Windows operating system can also use Safari browser. It now also has the ability for saving Web sites completely as Web Archives.The latest of the safari is version 4, that concentrates more on the technical side, like the rendering of pages, support for a variety of CSS,Java, XHTML, etc.,
The new kid-Chrome
This browser took the worl by storm, how? well it's a product from the guys at Google.Hence the reputation of Google itself propelled the success of this browser-Google Chrome.Google chrome uses it's own web-kit and layout and render engines.The first release was as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11 2008.It is considered to be the fourth most widely used browser in the world.Cross platform,development versions of Chrome for Linux and Mac OS X were released in 2009.Google got help by releasing it's source as a open source one and hence built on the development, new versions for Linux and Mac OS.
Google wanted to support itself in the internet business and one of the ideas that came up was building it's own browser that supported the web application like those of google ans similar one over other websites.Hence Google started hiring some top programmers and designers from the FireFox team and they used their own web-kit to build on the browser, which was initially called Chromium.The main reason for going for a new type of browser is that these days the PCs offer lot of computing power, and a lot of Bandwidth over internet, hence utilizing these were essential for the web applications also Most od the web applications are made of different scripts and languages.Hence they built Chrome, that would run smoothly on any computer, be very lite on the CPU usage and deliver remarkable speeds.Resource monitoring is a big problem with a browser since tabbed browsing arrived.
Before tabbed browsing, the web pages would lode in different windows, if one window is not rendering properly or if there was an error , we can close it and still have our information in other windows, but since tabbed browsing happens in the same browser, if one of the tabs go haywire, the entire browser must be closed and opened again.This problem was addressed by Google chrome by separating the resources of each tab and considering them as separate entities, that way if one tab is not responding, we will not lose the other tabs.Also one other feature Google brought to the browsing industry is the ease of use- you no longer see those big toolbars and sidebars, addons, etc that took much space and sometimes you will have too much tools that you don't need.Hence Chrome doesn't have a menu!.Also the interface is sleek, with seamless tabbed browsing.The second version of google chrome is already out and the new features include enhanced rendering speeds, more support for scripting and other technicalities.With simple interface, great speeds, good looks(new themes can be installed for Chrome!) and the fastest startup speed,Google Chrome is here to stay!
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