Talk:Browser wars/Archive 1

Chart
Guys, the chart is completely miseading and bad. The percentage on the left only applies to IE/Win, otherwise it would look like Netscape still has a 90%+ share in the early 21st century. It tries to be both a pie chart showing area constrained into a rectangle, as well as a regular chart, and it does neither very well.

Can someone come up with a non-hybrid version that sucks less and is more legible? I'll do it myself if someone posts a link to the initial data that led to the chart. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 155.33.109.95 (talk • contribs)


 * It's a stacked graph. I've always thought it was obvious. Does it really need to be clarified? -- Schapel 15:31, 3 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with Schapel and personally believe the chart format is excellent; it well visualizes the impact of major events during the "War." 71.49.53.205 18:54, 17 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I too agree that the chart is good. But I also agree that it is missleading since it is so much out of date. Some statistics show that IE is down to some 53%, having lost their market mainly to mozilla based browsers, such as firefox, mozilla and Safari(?). The chart needs an update. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.225.105.62 (talk) 14:17, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Mobile Devices
Under "Other browser competition", someone who has a good grasp of the mobile devices browser market should flesh out that section. -- Limulus 13:00, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Right now it reads like an Opera advertisement. Mathiastck 20:59, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

"Safari, Apple's browser based on WebKit/KHTML, available on iPhone and iPod Touch is also a serious competitor."

SERIOUSLY???? I am not aware of safari being used on any other device than the ones mentioned. The devices dont support any other browser. There is no competition by or for safari in the mobile devices section. The part "is also a serious competitor." seems misleading to me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.126.155.29 (talk) 13:28, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

YES Seriously, it is the most used mobile browser above IE Mobile Source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=106&qpmr=14&qpdt=1&qpct=0&sample=4 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.181.144.137 (talk) 23:39, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

misc
"the cause of the success" of computer worms might be a bit too strong. Maybe it should read "a major factor in the success" Lefty 22:49, 2004 Feb 24 (UTC)

Re FrontPage: The current version (from 62.252.0.4) has a paragraph about about web designers not using "best viewed in Netscape" with an explanation that this was because of IE's "more complete support for web standards such as CSS" and obscures the original point about Microsoft's FrontPage producing IE-friendly HTML (at the expense of Netscape interoperability). I've reverted this comment once. In context, this is a list of advantages Microsoft exercised in the browser wars. IMO, releasing and promoting the use of a tool that generated HTML that favored one browser over another was one of the many subtle or not so subtle ways Microsoft used to kill Netscape. The effect (as was desired by Microsoft) was that some web designers stopped using "best viewed in Netscape". Could we perhaps move the bit about "best viewed in" to another place in the article and leave Microsoft's promotion of FrontPage in the list? Rick Block 14:14, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Market share
I pulled this...


 * However, IE's market share is currently estimated at 85% and dropping at a rate of 1% per 2 weeks.


 * Interestingly, following the CERT's well-publicized suggestion to use an alternative browser after a flood of IE invulnerabilities, Mozilla Firefox is widely said to gain 1% of the total browser market overnight.

Does anyone have a reliable source for these numbers? Also "widely said" by who? AlistairMcMillan 14:38, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * According to, firefox+moz has about 30% of the users, much more than in the graphics on this page. 150.227.16.253 10:46, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Once again, the stats at W3 Schools are for that one site only. They are not representative of overall browser usage. See the usage share article for more details. -- Schapel 13:25, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * The problem is that the 1% statistic is from a Softepedia article that says the statistic is from Net Applications, but Net Applications says that Firefox has 17%, so I'm not sure what exactly is going on with that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.52.215.67 (talk) 20:23, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Under the heading "The second browser war", I find the following to be extremely misleading:
 * An October 2006 Softpedia article notes, "IE6 had the lion's share of the browser market with 77.22%. Internet Explorer 7 had climbed to 3.18%, while Firefox 2.0 was at 0.69%

Firefox 2.0 was released at the end of October 2006, meaning 0.69% was their market share at the end of their first week of release. Furthermore, the original article only included those stats to show that in a little over a year, Firefox 2.0 held 16% of the market share, so putting the 1 liner completely out of context in the article seems very misleading. —Preceding unsigned comment added by David510 (talk • contribs) 10:01, 7 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree. I just updated the current stats at the end of this section.  While I was at it I pulled this quote altogether. It didn't add anything to the overall story, gave undue weight to the figures at that one point in time and, most worryingly, as David510 says above, it seemed to be using one isolated sentence, that was already secondary to the source itself (referring back to 2006 data in a 2008 article), to make a point that was the unrelated to the main point of the article, which was about how new browser versions eat into usage of the old versions, contrasting IE and FF recent releases.  Isn't that 'original synthesis' in contravention of WP:OR? Who cares? It added nothing to the story anyway. --Nigelj (talk) 18:04, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

I.E. 6
There has been an update to IE since the article was written. It was bundled with Win XP Service Pack 2


 * There has not been any major feature-driven update of Internet Explorer for quite some time. Bug fixes are not considered to be "feature updates".  In other words, there is no Internet Explorer 6.5 or 7.0, yet. -[Unknown&#x5d; 03:29, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)


 * Yes there has. IE 6 w/ SP2 has several new features--Will2k 05:24, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)


 * Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 2 is a security related update. While it has "new features" such as the information bar, these are not truly new features as much as security related changes.  Windows 2000, for example, is a version of Windows.  While there are more than a couple service packs for Windows 2000, Windows XP is the new version, not Windows 2000 Service Pack 4.  A new version of Internet Explorer would, in kind, be a new version of it.
 * That means that "there have been no new versions of Internet Explorer since version 6.0" is totally true. And, my above statement - "There has not been any major feature-driven update of Internet Explorer for quite some time" is also true.  Service Pack 2 was not a feature-driven update.  It was not a new version - if it was, it would have been called 6.1 or something.  This is of course the standard versioning system in computer science, and the way I and Microsoft both describe releases of our software.  Had Service Pack 2 been a new version of Internet Explorer, you would see a new version number in your about dialog.  It's really that simple. -[Unknown&#x5d; 05:55, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)


 * What, like the line that says, "Update Versions: SP2"?
 * "While it has "new features"... these are not truly new features..." Really? Seriously? I would suppose you would call adding central air conditioning to a house a "temperature-related change" and not a "feature addition"?

history
Can anyone substantiate the first and second paragraphs under history? These attribute specific motives to Microsoft that I don't know are verifiable, or even true. My impression (also probably not verifiable, and perhaps not true) is that Microsoft saw the web and the web browser as a potential threat to Windows as the dominant computer/user interface and therefore had to gain control of it (to limit its functionality and ensure the continued dominance of Windows). The point is if users spend most of their time in a browser, and browsers can run equally well on any OS, the OS becomes irrelevant. I think it's somewhat POV to make any claim about Microsoft's motives in this case (even, perhaps especially, direct quotes from Microsoft about their motives). My suggestion is to delete the entire second paragraph under history and delete the "Microsoft saw the success ..." clause from the first paragraph (leaving the sentence "Microsoft licensed Mosaic ..."). I think the facts are that Netscape was the defacto standard web browser and for whatever reason Microsoft decided to put them out of business. -- Rick Block 19:11, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

How are acctual quotes NPOV? Removing this info would be NPOV.

Pre-Browser Wars
Since, outside of Wikipedia, the IE vs. Netscape wars is considered the first browser wars and the current browser wars with IE vs. Firefox is the second browsers wars, I think we should change


 * 1) Browser Wars I: Mosaic Wars
 * 2) Browser Wars II: Netscape Wars
 * 3) Browser Wars III: Internet Explorer Wars

to


 * 1) Pre-Browser Wars: Mosaic Wars
 * 2) Browser Wars I: Netscape Wars
 * 3) Browser Wars II: Internet Explorer Wars

--mathwizxp 01:50, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

IE vs Netscape - the takeup by users?
Does any know what the takeup/takeover numbers for IE vs Netscape looked like in the 1990s, versus what the Firefox vs IE takeup/takeover numbers look like? I'm interested to see whether FF is grabbing market share more quickly or slowly that IE did when it first gained a serious foothold. --Richard@lbrc.org 16:25, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
 * See the Usage share of web browsers article for data on early adoption of IE. Be careful to compare numbers, because near the end of 1996 IE was included with Windows and therefore gained share very rapidly. -- Schapel 18:58, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Consequences
Because Internet Explorer has the word "Internet" in its name, inexperienced users are sometimes misled into believing that Internet Explorer is the Internet...

To me, this paragraph seemed to be nothing more than unsupported speculation, with some advertisments thrown in for good measure. Can anyone offer a good reason to put it back? Cymsdale 19:37, 25 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Numerous legends of people calling tech support saying "I deleted the Internet, help!" come to mind... that's probably how that started. It's not worth putting in, unless there's a seperate article on stupid tech support callers. A search returns 163,000 results:

--Planetary 22:49, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

I might add that the use of generic descriptive branding of bundled products generally does induce in inexperienced users, the illusion that the product concerned has no competition. This lends itself to a merging of product and function. Internet Explorer is an interesting example, but anyone can take a survey at their workplace to find out how many people are not aware that other word processors exist apart from Word. The dividing line between operating system, application and data in user perception is in reality a very fuzzy line. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.111.225.252 (talk) 08:43, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Distinction? Most of my users call anything "procedure", be it the OS, a software, a webapp, an excel file(with or without formulas) or any other file. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.74.176.55 (talk) 14:55, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

It was Apache that killed Netscape business model not IIS
I removed


 * Netscape's business model was not to give away its browser but sell server software...

It was Apache that killed Netscape business model not IIS. According to Apache HTTP Server "When first released, Apache was the only viable open source alternative to the Netscape web server (currently known as Sun Java System Web Server). It has since evolved to rival other Unix-based web servers in terms of functionality and performance. Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server on the Internet."


 * Microsoft created licensing agreements with computer manufacturers...

That's simply not true. Sorry.


 * Microsoft made it very easy for small and medium ISPs...

There was a CCK from Netscape that allowed ISP to configure and brand Netscape Navigator easily

-- 62.178.136.129 16:56, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

graph at top of article
Hi. I notice the graph shown in this article doesn't cite the source of its data (nor in the description page on the commons wikipedia), therefore I've added a Fact tag until this is done. I have noticed some similar data, such as this, and I would be interested to see what sort of graph these numbers produce. I think it would be cool to have different shades of one colour for all the Netscape versions, and different shades of another colour for the IE versions. I would do this myself, if I had time. Any offers?! --Rebroad 10:56, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I've been replacing the browser usage share graphs with data from usage share. I still have the two that list multiple browsers to do (the one in this article, and the one at the top of the usage share article). -- Schapel 13:12, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Picture creep
There's too many pictures in this article, to the point where the page looks cluttered. Is there a possibility that some can be removed? Inkbottle 00:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Browser Wars Project Link


The link to "http://www.browser-war.org/index.php" really should be removed..... Look at the image, that's hardly a representitive sample! All in favour say "Ay!"

GoddersUK 20:52, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * All the silly "browser wars" links should be removed. They don't seem to have anything to do with the content of this article, but rather are hawked by browser fanbois as a way of claiming their browser is best or most popular. -- Schapel 04:29, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Repetitive sentences
The paragraph "The first browser war" and the sub-paragraph "Internet Explorer dominance" both include a similar sentence: "It was faster and it adopted the W3C's published specifications more faithfully than Netscape Navigator 4.0. Unlike Netscape, it provided the possibility for truly "dynamic" pages in which the flow of the text and images of the page could be altered after the page was loaded." Shouldn't it be changed? 154.20.151.165 04:17, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Best viewed with IE/Netscape logo
Where can I get one of those "Best viewed with..." logos?Astroview120mm 20:19, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
 * You might try searching with Google, but you might also visit http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:13, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Inclusion of Safari in 2nd browser wars and not Opera
I don't even use Opera so don't call me an unhappy fanboy. But it seems unfair to me that the article seems to suggest that Safari just entered the browser war and therefore gets special mention within the 2nd war section but Opera, which has been around (on the windows platform) for longer and has greater or comparable market share, is not given a single mention within that section, but is instead shunted off into the "other browsers" section. I think in the interests of fairness some sort of discussion needs to be had as to what requirements need to be met by a browser to qualify it as a major player in the 2nd war. Something like minumum market share. Otherwise we could argue all day between different browser loyalists about whether or not a browser deserves mention. Ninj4 13:18, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Opera has been around a lot longer you are correct but Safari has a (comperativly) much larger market share. Source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.181.144.137 (talk) 23:42, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

PSP
As far as I'm aware the psp browser is Netfront. Definitely not mozilla as the article claims. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.37.231.136 (talk) 23:41, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Ubuntu.png
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BetacommandBot (talk) 06:38, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Opera 3rd on Windows?
In the "Windows" section of "Other Browser Competition" it's claimed that " Opera is the third most popular browser on Windows" and is not sourced. I've not been able to find any market share statistics that only show WIndows browsers so i havn't changed it but i would argue that with nearly 6x more marketshare (overall) Safari is likely to be the third on Windows as well. Does anyone have statistics to either prove or disprove this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.181.144.137 (talk) 19:37, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Cleanup
I've had a bit of a go-over on the page as it was a bit of a disaster, but more sources are required, its lacking some detail (it's a little biased towards IE IMO) and the second browser war is extremely badly written - it needs to explain better how market-share shifted, how there was a movement towards supporting FireFox (and its features such as extensions and IE's security reputation which led to its takeup) leading to the reformation of the IE team and the fact there has been an increased push towards W3Cs standards rather than browser-centric code. There should be more on the antitrust action and eventual settlement, and the lack of mention of IE5's incorrect box model or ActiveX also bugs me. -93.96.212.203 (talk) 01:32, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

all over again?
It seams to me (but may be hard to cite) that the browser wars are starting up again. It started with the release of Firefox 2 at the same time as IE 7. Then again (I may be wrong) with Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. Now it seams that IE 8, Opera 10, Safari 4 and Firefox 4 may be released close together (though Firefox may be quite a while in the future). Also browsers seam to be borrowing aspects of other browsers, like firefoxs awesome bar on IE8 and Opera 9.5. Is IE8 becoming standards compliant to win the competition back? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Yhulkdsfdd (talk • contribs) 07:07, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Google Browser (chrome)
In addition to the above, google is launching a browser called chrome, aimed at competing against firefox and ie.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7593106.stm

Yhulkdsfdd (talk) 17:58, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Chrome major competitor?
This sentence in the opening paragraph seems skewed to me: "The term is used to denote ... the competition between the dominating Internet Explorer and several emerging browsers that has been since 2003, most notably including Mozilla Firefox and not until recently, Google Chrome."

While Chrome may someday be worthy of being mentioned in such a prominent place in the article, I think it's very premature at this point - as of this writing it's only been in open beta for two days. It's just too early to say whether or not it will leave a significant mark on the Browser Wars. Arsivis (talk) 05:01, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Merchantability is more important than market share and this is what makes Chrome a major competitor. Chrome does a better job of rendering, having passed the acid 3 test 100% - a feat achieved by few other browsers. If a browser does not function substantially as documented (which is exactly what acid 2 and acid 3 test) then it's not even in the same market. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.111.225.252 (talk) 08:50, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Relativity of browser statistics
I have not found any subject in the article about the relativity of browser statistics. There are many ways of measuring the browser market shares and as many way to ditsort them.

I'm referring to an article on http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/nostats.html to know what I'm talking about. A paragraph should be dedicated to this matter when it comes to brower wars.

Bxlbjorn (talk) 11:49, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with Image:Internet Explorer 1.0.png
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Goals
Maybe this is a dumb question, but what is the advantage of winning the browser war? Does is bring in revenue? I can't really see how. If someone has a good answer, it's probably worth adding the article. 67.193.131.167 (talk) 22:13, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * No one ever answered this. 67.193.131.167 (talk) 00:59, 25 February 2009 (UTC)


 * See . -- Rick Block (talk) 01:26, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Both companies (Microsoft and Netscape) used free browsers to leverage their not-free server software. In those days, many companies thought they could own the whole business but didn't realize that the internet was more important than the back-room servers and the businesses they supported. What was worse is that MS used browser-bloat to compensate for bad pages containing non-compliant HTML (hey, our browser will render more pages than yours). After MS won the browser war, they did almost nothing with their lead (which makes me think that putting Netscape out of business might have been part of their original intention). When Netscape was on the chopping block with some of the business going to AOL, someone (I can't remember who) got the bright idea of putting the Netscape's rendering engine into the public domain as part o the Mozilla Foundation. Everyone using Windows on a PC thought this was a waste of time. However, everyone using any kind of UNIX operating system realized this was their only hope to continuing surfing. As everyone already knows, Mozilla is the basis for many alternate browsers including Firefox. Today, I personally know many professional web page publishers who first develop/test with Firefox and then switch to IE to fix up all the cross-browser issues. To do a good job you've got to check with all browsers and this brings up the modern point of view: 10 years ago their was no Amazon.com or eBay so maybe a company could think they could own the whole business. Today, the people who develop cross-browser support for these sites are (in my opinion) tortured souls as well as geniuses. Thank god MS now has a plan to get IE8 more compliant but they probably won't be 100% finished until IE9. --Neilrieck (talk) 16:55, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

The answer may be simple, but it's actually the smartest question anyone's ever bothered to ask about the browser wars. The advantage of winning the browser wars was the ability to ignore the World Wide Web Consortium, dictate web standards directly through browser technology, and thereby dominate the web editing and content management market. Frontpage and Expressionweb typically bring in several hundred dollars per license and that is what drives the push towards market segmentation. Market segmentation backfired on Apple/Macintosh in the 80's and 90's and it backfired so badly on Netscape (who all but ignored CSS in favour of a proprietary feature) that it put them out of the race. If Microsoft's seemingly standard corporate strategies really cut off Netscape's air supply, Mozilla and Firefox would never have been able to take their first breath. However, Mozilla succeeded by correcting the errors of Netscape - and instead of trying to monopolise the development market, they focused standards compliance. DHTML, VBScript, VML, ActiveX, MSHTML, ASP, .NET, XAML, etc are all examples of new market segments in the continuing battle for developer dollars, but the smart money will always be on universally recognised standards (such as XML, CSS 2.1, HTML 4.01, and XHTML 1.0 at the time of writing) - because only full compliance here will connect the developer with the broadest market. With much of XML functionality witheld from IE8 (eg. correct DTD application), it would seem that Microsoft has learned little from the self destruction of Netscape. They've literally given Firefox (which can use the DTD to determine how to present an SVG file) another chunk of market share on a silver platter. What do you think will happen as developers begin to require the use of high definition scalable and mathematically compatible formats such as SVG? I can see the ALT text now: "To view this comparative graph of atmospheric CO2 concentration, global mean temperature, and mass extinction rates over the Phanerozoic; download XYZ non-MS browser"...? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.111.225.252 (talk) 09:43, 11 July 2009 (UTC)