Web Browser Turns 10

The original Mosaic browser, born in the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications, turns 10 this year.  ZDNet has a nice history article, which reminds us that “in 1995, Netscape’s Navigator owned 80 percent of the browser market but by 2000 Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had reversed the numbers.”

The original IE 1.0 browser code was licensed from Spyglass, which was a commercial arm for the NCSA Mosaic browser work.  As usual, MS bought a technology and then modified it.

This tabled history of when the various browser versions were released reminds me of all the rewriting I’ve had to do of this web site.  When it was started, the compatibility issues were with Netscape 1.0, IE 2.0 and Mosaic 2.1, and new versions were coming out monthly.  Now, with IE have 95% of the market and MS rarely making any significant changes, things are much easier.