After Netscape lost the first browser war, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer settled into a near-total grip on the web. With little competition, the pace of browser improvement slowed, and web developers increasingly built for one browser’s quirks rather than for open standards. The second browser war is the story of how that monopoly was broken.
The first challenger came from Mozilla, the open-source project created when Netscape released its source code in 1998. Mozilla announced Firefox 1.0 in November 2004, pitching it as “a more robust, user-friendly and trustworthy web experience” with features such as a built-in pop-up blocker and tabbed browsing. Firefox gave users a credible free alternative and gave developers a reason to test against more than one browser again.
The second, larger wave came from Google. In its 2008 announcement “A fresh take on the browser,” Google argued the web had become a platform for applications and launched Chrome, built on the WebKit engine and a fast new JavaScript engine called V8. Chrome’s speed and its model of quietly updating itself in the background raised expectations for every browser.
The combined pressure from Firefox, Chrome, and Apple’s Safari pushed the whole industry toward faster JavaScript engines, broader support for open web standards, and the now-normal practice of browsers that update themselves continuously rather than shipping in big infrequent versions. Competition, rather than any single company, became the engine that kept the web moving forward.