This article was originally published through Matthew Guay in Capiche, a secret partnership for tough SaaS users, which is building a new network of other people who care about software to make the SaaS industry more transparent, together.
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Empires arise and then temporarily fall into technology. One year, the Web is just a vision of “everything that can be connected to anything,” as inventor Tim Berners-Lee put it before launching the Web in the late 1990s. Five years later, Microsoft would associate its Internet Explorer browser with Windows, something the U.S. Department of Justice called anti-competitive in 1998.
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“The Web is already such an important component of our lives that familiarity has obscured our belief on the Web itself,” Berners-Lee wrote in 1999, much more a few decades later. It’s almost hard for a global without a browser, tabs and favorites.
The web and browsers didn’t simply change computing. They changed us, forever.
First, the Web has its language.
The navigators were cows grazing in the field. Humans on the shelves to read the next e-book had a brief similarity, so they were also called navigators.
Then the Internet came along, and it’s hard to believe that browsers are more than just programs to access the web.
We needed anything to call the app that we would use on the web, and the basics had been set years before. InfoWorld in 1983 discussed a reader as a “browser”, however, before that year, the logo replacement had begun in an article about Smalltalk’s past, a new programming environment in Xerox’s PARC lab.
“The programmer’s demo allows you to write a program in a window called ‘browser’,” explained John Markoff, infoWorld editor. “When the program finishes, you can create a menu item that compiles that text without saving it to disk.” No files, no backup, just browsing.
This concept stayed there to call other software to visualize things. Dr. Dobb’s Journal discussed the Browse command to view records without converting them as a record browser in 1984. And in 1987, when Microsoft was rumored to create a HyperCard competitor, Robert Cringely said, “It’s called Navigator, rightly.” Browsers were not unusual before the Internet needed them.
Navigation in its original sense was part of Tim Berners-Lee’s original inspiration for the Web, with the Victorian e-book Inquire Within Upon Everything. The first single-volume encyclopedia was “a portal to global information,” recalls Berners-Lee, covering “everything from how stains on garments to tricks to make an economic investment.” It was a hardcover Internet from an earlier era, where a young Tim was looking for information.
Browser alone, a term too restrictive for Berners-Lee, who conceived the Web as an interactive position in which we read and write in combination on the Web. So he called WorldWideWeb a “browser/editor”, but the hanger did not last long. “As soon as the developers created their consumer charts as a browser and published it worldwide, very few took the trouble to continue doing so as an editor,” Berners-Lee lamented in his e-book Weaving the Web.
Browser locked. And with the name, the concept of the Web as a position in which we scroll through content (browse or create) would remain until Internet programs reinvented software on the Internet.
It’s not the last word the Web would change. The Web itself borrowed from what the spiders weave. The sites were sites, until they became websites. The links were part of a string, until they have been converted to text under pressure. And now there’s a full urban dictionary, full of, component, with words that we’ve invented and reused together on the Web.
Then the Web replaced the “we work”.
WorldWideWeb was a quite basic reader, a proof of concept for Berners-Lee’s hyperlinked text ideas. You could read and edit HTML pages, but you couldn’t embed photos or other media. The students at the University of Illinois demanded more. Thus came Mosaic as a project from students, where the National Center for Supercomputing funded the browser that made the web popular.
Mosaic has turned the Internet into a magazine, with more complicated images and online designs. Netflix or Spotify could not yet be created, but the seeds were planted with integrated media. The Web would not just be a collection of static documents.
Mosaic is also the original downloadable app. If you already have a browser, you can download Mosaic and install it freely on Unix, Windows or Mac, first look at the app retail stores of the future.
And that’s what replaced the world. Mosaic was not just software that was still the same, as classical canned software had done until then. It evolved immediately, in the first example of immediate iteration and the uninterrupted publishing cycles that Internet programs would later bring to software development, which would then be the uninterrupted cycle of data in the media.
“Marc has maintained an almost constant presence in concentrated Internet groups,” said Berners-Lee of Marc Andreessen, one of Mosaic’s developers. People would ask for something, he would load it as a new feature and publish it, and then repeat it in his next comments. Each new feature has a greater popularity of Mosaic. Why use the same old software when a higher edition is a click away?
This set the tone for decades of Internet development. When your competition is just a tab or download, you can’t stop paying attention to users. Give them what they need and they’ll give you a quasi-monopoly, until someone bigger meets their needs, and your app will work as well.
“Marc, more than anyone, seemed interested in meeting the needs of users,” Berners-Lee said. Thus, more complicated Internet pages, the finished edition, had appeared, much to the frustration of the inventor of the Web.
Then, one way or another, the cycle closes. As Gary Wolf pointed out at Wired, after seeing others realize Mosaic’s richest network, “almost every one of those who use it feels the impetus to upload their own content.” The edition would be in the center of the web, from the original home pages in Geocities to WordPress blogs, prestige Facebook updates and each and every new record running in G Suite and Figma and more. This would come only from programs on the web, rather than the browser itself.
Then the web everything.
AOL had its own network, with publishers such as National Geographic and the Smithsonian. Early Apple workers introduced General Magic and built a first smartphone-like device, with a traditional network powered by AT-T.
The Internet is nice, so was the concept, but traditional long-term networks run through media companies. The Web started the concept, but it had to be a data highway, a larger television.
Netscape turned the Web into a business, triggering the Internet bubble when the one-year-old company suddenly valued $3 billion after its IPO. The Web here to stay and with it the tech startups that would dominate the NASDAQ in the coming decades.
WorldWideWeb rejected the assumption that the data may simply not be connected, Mosaic, that the data had to be clear, Netscape that the Web was only for the educational world. And along the way, it brought Javascript and Internet interaction, as well as SSL encryption for secure transactions, paving the way for Internet applications.
Rebuilding your main product around anything you’ve invented five years earlier would be crazy in the analog age. But once the Web accelerated everything, there wasn’t much left to do. Adapt or die.
“The Internet is a tidal wave,” wrote Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 1995. “It changes the rules.”
First, they authorized it to Mosaic, used it to create the first versions of Internet Explorer, and released it with Windows. They were then combined with Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 4. You can place parts of Internet sites on your desktop and use the same interface to browse your files or Internet sites. The Web is not just one more application, it is an essential component of your PC: a first clue of what ChromeOS, exclusively Web, would offer decades later.
We would hate through stacks of toolbars, aspire to an easier website. But the concept that software progression would revolve around the Web remained blocked, enough to uproot Microsoft’s domain in desktop software.
“Our paintings have allowed developers to move from the Win32 API, Microsoft’s patented platform, to the Internet,” Horowitz of the netscape team said. Ironically, Microsoft itself made the rest of the paintings, driving the expansion of the Web while accelerating the disappearance of Windows at the same time. Decades later, it is rare to see enterprise software evolve for anything other than the Web.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has won the thanks for a combination of new features and fixes with up to new computers, Windows and Mac. He then became complacent, launched Internet Explorer 6 in 2001 and then waited five years before creating the browser.
The immediate iteration that propelled Mosaic, then Netscape and then IS had stopped. Perhaps, after all, we would be delighted with the desktop software.
Then the Netscape team joined, built Firefox and turned Internet Explorer into an undeniable tool to download a better browser. It was fast, with features like tabs and pop-up blockers that tamed the Internet and allowed developers to create extensions that made it a difficult browser.
Then Steve Jobs made the decision that Apple deserved to create a browser. “Concentration would be one thing: speed,” recalled engineer Ken Ko descender. “Steve was looking for our browser to be fast, fast … much faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer, the product we wanted to replace.” So they created KHTML, a Linux browser engine, turned it into a Webkit, created Apple’s Safari browser and put the Internet in our pockets.
Webkit, in turn, provided Google’s basics for building Chrome. The search giant forked Webkit’s rendering engine, added a faster Javascript engine to improve the program browser, and got rid of everything else. Google called the browser after the chrome UI surrounding the web, and then removed most of it. Gone are the toolbars that crowded IE and the call bar that advertised the site call. The Google search field, which has become a secondary bar to deal with since Firefox added it, has also disappeared.
Chrome had less Chrome than any other browser, left the focus on the web. He searched and navigated in the same box, with extensions relegated to small icons. Everything else on the web.
And that stayed. Today, all browsers sometimes look the same, with a unified loading/search bar, extensions in the form of small toolbar buttons, and tabbed site names. Almost all browsers also work the same way: Webkit still powers Safari, its Blink fork engine boosts Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Opera, while Firefox only has one unique rendering engine. And all browsers now support similar Internet extensions, as Google’s easiest extensions have become the default way to load features on the Internet.
One way or another, by removing anything that isn’t essential, Chrome won the browser war. It was the Internet we wanted, as a platform for sites and positioning software. Everything else was an extra.
The internet market is fickle.
The World Wide Web is the only browser. Afterwards, Mosaic has temporarily become the crowd favorite, before being overshadowed by Netscape, the competition browser built through one of its founders.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had a 33% market acceptance rate when they were accused of anti-competitive practices; peak at around 96% of market place at the beginning of 2002. Then came Firefox as Netscape’s revenge, earning more than 30% market place percentage in 2009 before Apple Safari, related to the iPhone’s popularity, gave it more than 20% percentage in 2014.
It is now Google’s global, with the search giant’s Chrome used by over 70% of Internet users and the newest browser of Microsoft generation.
Current browsers are the best remix. They came here and left at an unexpected speed, each successor picking up the most productive things brought through its predecessor and adding new twists. And they’ve remade the global in their own image. We now expect loose software updates, tabs and bookmarks, and software vendors to be worth billions overnight. We are used to a language imbued with technology that adapts the way we communicate.
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