Browser War’s

  In the early 1990s there were many simple graphic-oriented World Wide Web browsers available. The first which reached widespread popularity was Mosaic, developed at NCSA. Several companies licensed it to create their own commercial browsers, such as Spry Mosaic and Spyglass Mosaic. One of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreessen, founded the company Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mosaic Netscape. To resolve legal issues with NCSA, the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser improved on Mosaic's usability and reliability, and it soon dominated the market, helped by the fact that "evaluation copies" of the browser were downloadable without restrictions or cost.

By mid-1995, the World Wide Web gradually began receiving a great deal of attention in the popular culture and mass media. Netscape Navigator was the dominant and most widely used web browser at that time, while Microsoft had just licensed Mosaic as the basis of Internet Explorer 1.0 which it released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Pack in August 1995. Internet Explorer 2.0 was released three months later.

  New versions of Netscape Navigator (later Netscape Communicator) and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years. Features often took priority over bug fixes, and therefore the browser wars were a time of unstable browsers, shaky Web standards compliance, frequent crashes, security holes, and lots of user headaches. Internet Explorer only began to approach par with its competition with version 3.0 (1996), which offered scripting support and the market's first commercial Cascading Style Sheets implementation.

Internet Explorer 7 was finally released in October 2006. It included features such as the tabbed browsing seen in Opera version 2, a search bar, and improved support for web standards. Additionally, it included a publishing filter and a new GUI redesign. Microsoft distributed Internet Explorer 7 to genuine Windows users as a high priority update through Microsoft Update

 

On the 11 June 2007, Apple officially entered the second browser war by releasing a BETA version of their Safari 3 browser for Microsoft Windows.

Linux and Unix

The Unix-based Konqueror browser is part of the KDE project and is the primary competitor against Mozilla-based browsers

Mac OS

Safari is Apple's web browser and is the most popular web browser for Mac OS X The web browser is based on KHTML. Other browsers include Shiira, and OmniWeb, which use the API WebKit, and many Macintosh programs are adding web-browsing functionality

Camino is a Mozilla-based browser for the Mac OS X platform, and uses Mac's native Cocoa interface like Safari does, instead of Mozilla's XUL which is used in Firefox

Gmail

Gmail groups emails in a thread into a single line in the inbox. Some users love this, others hate it. It’s not my favorite feature, but I’ve gotten used to it. The best Gmail feature in my opinion is the ability to tag emails for better organization and search. None of the other services offer this. Gmail also has integrated Gtalk into the GMail interface, and continues to add other functionality as well (such as integration with Docs & Spreadsheets). Gmail is consistently fast, offers the most storage and free POP-in and POP-out, meaning you can use Gmail to access your other email accounts, or access GMail from whatever email client you use. It’s a near-perfect piece of software, and has only occasional hiccups. The fact that Google is paired with Google Calendar, the best online Calendar application, doesn’t hurt, either.

Windows Live Hotmail

The new Windows Live Hotmail will be a welcome change to Microsoft’s 228 million webmail users, but it falls short of the Yahoo and Gmail offerings. They offer 2 GB of storage, better than Yahoo, but there are no POP-in or POP-out features at all. If you want to access your account outside of the web site, you have to do it via Outlook or Outlook Express. It remains the slowest among the three in our tests.

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail is very good, allowing users to access other email accounts (POP-in), but only offering POP-out access for an additional fee. This is probably due to the legacy users who are already paying for this feature - Yahoo may not want to give up this revenue stream. Storage is on the low side - only 1 GB, which is less than half of what Gmail offers. Still, Yahoo Mail has recently been running very fast and offers an intuitive, Outlook-like interface. Instant Messaging and RSS integration is awesome.