By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World
October 9, 2009

Web Browser Milestones

The Web browser turns 15 on Oct. 13, 2009 – a key milestone in the history of the Internet. That’s when the first commercial Web browser – eventually called Netscape Navigator – was released as beta code. While researchers including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications created Unix browsers between 1991 and 1994, Netscape Navigator made this small piece of desktop software a household name. By allowing average users to view text and images posted on Web sites, Netscape Navigator helped launch the Internet era along with multiple browser wars, government-led lawsuits and many software innovations. Here are 15 highlights in the history of the Web browser.

January 7, 2003

Apple enters the browser fray with Safari
Apple released a beta version of Safari, which would become its standard Web browser built into the Mac operating system later that year. In June 2007, Apple released a version of Safari for Windows XP and Vista systems. Safari also is the browser used in Apple’s iPhone. In June 2009, Apple released Safari 4 featuring speedier performance, enhanced integration with Windows and an at-a-glance view of a user’s favorite Web sites. More than 11 million copies of Safari 4 were downloaded in the first three days of availability, Apple said. A niche player, Safari has less than 1% market share, Janco Associates says.

February 9, 2004

Firefox released, gains mindshare with techies
The Mozilla Foundation released a beta version of Firefox – dubbed Firebox 0.8 – that would soon catch on as a speedy alternative to Internet Explorer. By 2004, Microsoft had more than 87% of the browser market, according to Janco Associates. But within six months of this release, Firefox was the preferred browser among techies, winning awards at Linuxworld Expo and being dubbed hot by Wired Magazine. Firefox grew in popularity, and today this free, open source browser has 19.2% market share.

December 13, 2007

Opera files antitrust complaints against Microsoft
Opera filed a complaint with the European Commission (headed by Neelie Kroes, shown here), claiming that Microsoft violates antitrust laws by integrating Internet Explorer into the Windows operating system and by failing to follow open Web standards. Microsoft has offered to provide its customers with a menu of available browsers to download rather than installing Internet Explorer by default in Windows 7. The EC says it hopes to settle the case before year’s end.

January 14, 2008

Web browsers top Internet vulnerability list
For the first time, Web browser attacks top the list of the Top 10 Cyber Security Menaces for 2008 compiled by SANS Institute. The infosec research group says malicious code placed on popular, trusted Web sites is exploiting components of Web browsers, such as Flash and QuickTime. These attacks are gaining in sophistication and becoming more common. In December 2008, Microsoft would announce a “ huge increase ” in Internet Explorer attacks, one of several times Microsoft must scramble to patch a browser vulnerability.

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World
October 9, 2009

Web Browser Milestones

The Web browser turns 15 on Oct. 13, 2009 – a key milestone in the history of the Internet. That’s when the first commercial Web browser – eventually called Netscape Navigator – was released as beta code. While researchers including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications created Unix browsers between 1991 and 1994, Netscape Navigator made this small piece of desktop software a household name. By allowing average users to view text and images posted on Web sites, Netscape Navigator helped launch the Internet era along with multiple browser wars, government-led lawsuits and many software innovations. Here are 15 highlights in the history of the Web browser.

January 1, 1997

Opera introduced, targets mobile devices
Based in Norway, Internet Opera Software released its first Web browser for Windows, dubbed Opera 2.1. Opera has been a minor player in the Web browser market since then; it currently has 1.1% of the market, according to Janco Associates. Version 10 was released on Sept. 1, 2009. Opera Software claims 40 million users on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. Its mobile version - Opera Mini - claims 30 million users, including many BlackBerry users.

February 23, 1998

Netscape creates open source Mozilla Project
Netscape created the Mozilla Organization as an open source developer that would provide a free version of its browser. By February 1998, Netscape – which had 28% browser market share – had been vanquished by Microsoft – which had 69% market share – in the first browser war. In July 2003, the Mozilla Organization would morph into the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit. In 2005, the for-profit Mozilla Corp.- was created and would eventually deliver the popular Firefox browser.

May 18, 1998

Feds sure Microsoft over bundled browser
The U.S. Justice Department filed an antitrust case against Microsoft alleging that Microsoft abused monopoly power by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser into its Windows operating system. Working for DOJ, attorney David Boies (shown here) won the trial, and the verdict was upheld on appeal. DOJ reached a settlement with Microsoft in 2001, requiring Microsoft to share its APIs with other companies. Microsoft is required to meet this obligation until November 2009.

November 24, 1998

AOL buys Netscape
AOL announced plans to buy Netscape for $4.2 billion. The deal was a stock-for-stock transaction that ended up being worth more than $10 billion when it closed in March 1999. The merger required approval by the U.S. Department of Justice on antitrust grounds. AOL was not successful at helping Netscape regain market share for Navigator. In December 2007, AOL announced that it would no longer support Netscape Web browsers.

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World
October 9, 2009

Web Browser Milestones

The Web browser turns 15 on Oct. 13, 2009 – a key milestone in the history of the Internet. That’s when the first commercial Web browser – eventually called Netscape Navigator – was released as beta code. While researchers including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications created Unix browsers between 1991 and 1994, Netscape Navigator made this small piece of desktop software a household name. By allowing average users to view text and images posted on Web sites, Netscape Navigator helped launch the Internet era along with multiple browser wars, government-led lawsuits and many software innovations. Here are 15 highlights in the history of the Web browser.

October 13, 1994

First commercial browser released
Mosaic Communications Corp. – later renamed Netscape Communications Corp. – releases the beta version of its Web browser, called Mosaic Netscape 0.9. It was based on the Mosaic code developed by the NCSA, and Mosaic co-author Marc Andreessen was a co-founder of Netscape. The browser was later renamed Netscape Navigator. Version 1.0 was released on Dec. 15. Navigator was the first commercial Web browser to be wildly successful, rapidly achieving 90% market share before Microsoft entered the fray and took over the market. By 2000, Netscape’s market share would fall under 1%, Janco Associates says.

April 30, 1995

Web traffic dominates Internet
Six months after Netscape released its browser, Web traffic became the leading type of traffic on the Internet. For example, Web traffic accounted for 21% of the traffic on the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET backbone, while the No. 2 usage, File Transfer Protocol, traffic accounted for 14% of the traffic, according to livinginternet.com . This was a sign of the rapid adoption of Navigator, which saw 50 million copies distributed in its first two years, according to BusinessWeek.

August 24, 1995

Microsoft muscles into the browser market
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 in its Windows 95 Plus! Pack. Internet Explorer was built upon software licensed from Spyglass, an offshoot of NCSA that owned the technology behind the Mosaic browser. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer into its operating system and provided it free of charge. Microsoft’s approach was smart; two years later Microsoft had replaced Netscape as the leading browser provider, with 49% of the market compared with 46% for Netscape, according to Janco Associates.

Mozilla‘s Firefox Web browser has just hit a new milestone, reaching its 1 billionth user download. The big event happened Thursday night, according to the company’s official download counter.

To be clear, that’s 1 billion total downloads since Firefox’s 2004 debut — an atypical type of statistic to flaunt. Still, if you look at the more standard measures of success, Firefox is showing impressive growth, while the long-time industry giant continues to slide.

Firefox and the Browser Market
Measuring the first 30 days of July, Firefox holds an average of 30.5% of the global browser market, according to data from Web metrics firm StatCounter. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, sits at 60.12%. Safari and Chrome are tied at just over 3%, and Opera trails behind at 2.65%.

Where those numbers become more significant is in a year-to-year comparison: For the same time period in 2008, Firefox held 26.07% of the global browser market, while IE held 68.64%. Safari had 3.31%, Opera had 1.77%, and Chrome — well, Chrome was still just an improper noun back then.

Putting that into perspective, Firefox has grown its userbase by 17%, comparing its July ’08 and July ’09 numbers. IE, in the same comparison, has lost 12.4% of its users worldwide. Even the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 did little to help win over new fans for the once untouchable heavyweight.

Firefox and the Future
So what happens from here? The one certainty is that the browser market is in a state of flux. Even the smaller alternative browsers are slowly reshaping the playing field: In July of 2008, the alternatives made up only about 5% of the market. By July of 2009, with the addition of Chrome, they collectively have 8.67% of all worldwide users — a growth of 70.6% from the previous year.

In the big picture, IE maintains an advantage with its default preinstalled placement on Windows computers, as well as with its frequent adoption within the corporate world. The former factor, however, is starting to fade: Microsoft is for the first time shipping versions of Windows without IE preinstalled, thanks to the European Commission case surrounding anti-competition laws. That’s a significant change.

As for the latter factor — corporate browser usage — that may be Firefox’s toughest hurdle to overcome. Numerous analyses over the years have identified the enterprise realm as Mozilla’s Achilles’ heel. Though the company is taking steps to try to encourage corporate use of its product, many question whether the browser is ready for widespread business adoption.

However it is or isn’t being used, what’s remained constant with Firefox has been its ongoing growth alongside IE’s nonstop drop. From a statistical standpoint, that trend certainly seems to suggest the great browser race is far from finished; the tides, it appears, have plenty more shifting ahead.

The Firefox Web browser is fast approaching its billionth download and is likely to hit that milestone some time on Friday.

Mozilla has a Web site and a Twitter feed where people can keep track of the total. On Thursday afternoon, the feed showed more than 999,180,000 downloads, with about 15 more happening each second.

Mozilla said initially that it expected to hit the billion mark some time over the weekend. An hour later, as the news trickled out and the pace of downloads increased, Mozilla revised its estimate to Friday. An enthusiast Web site with a “Firefox Download Guesstimator” predicts it will reach a billion on Friday at noon GMT.

The figure includes all versions of Firefox since the first release in 2004. If a single user downloaded multiple copies for different computers, they are each counted in the total. And if a user goes to the Web site to download an update to an existing version, instead of waiting for the automatic download, that is counted as well. Automatic updates are not included in the total.

So the figure does not mean that 1 billion people are using Firefox. Still, it’s a significant achievement for a piece of software that was unknown to most of the world just a few years ago, and one that has had to compete with Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer, which ships free with every Windows PC.

Figures from earlier this month showed Firefox having just under a third of the global browser market, at 31%. Internet Explorer led the field with 60%, while Safari, Chrome and Opera each had less than 5%, according to Statcounter.

Firefox is stronger in Europe, where it has 40% of the market to IE’s 47%. In Asia, Firefox has 23% to IE’s 72%. In Antarctica, Statcounter says, the browsers are neck and neck.

Mozilla plans to launch a Web site Monday, at www.onebillionplusyou.com, where it will provide more information on the achievement.

The popular Firefox browser from Mozilla has just past its billionth download.

The company expected the milestone to be reached sometime today. As forecast, Firefox reached its landmark download at 15:00 UTC, at which point the browser was being downloaded at a rate of 24 times per second.

Those tracking the impending achievement could do so via an official Mozilla site or over on a Twitter account specifically set up to keep tabs on how many times the open source browser has been downloaded.

However, it’s worth noting that this benchmark doesn’t signify that Firefox has a billion active users, just how many times it has been downloaded since its 2004 launch.

Firefox is now at version 3.5 and is one of the fastest browsers available, second only to Google’s Chrome, and despite 3.5′s recent release the Mozilla foundation are already looking forward on how to improve the next version.

Mozilla is set to launch One Billion Plus You on Monday, with more details and comprehensive statistics on the accomplishment.

Be sure to share your thoughts and experiences with the Firefox browser in the comments.

Just days after releasing some proposed interface changes to Firefox 3.7 on its wiki, the Mozilla Foundation has put up a page to explore interface changes in Firefox 4.0.

Two main versions are displayed, one showing the tabs beneath the address bar and one with the tabs above it. The tabs-on-top look is nice and clean, and saves space, but eliminates the title bar.

click to enlarge images

Also on the wiki page is a demonstration of an idea for combining the go, refresh, and stop buttons into a single context-sensitive button.

As with the proposed changes to Firefox 3.7, the Firefox 4.0 changes are aiming to reduce interface complexity, increase page space, and hopefully increase clarity for the user while integrating more naturally into Windows. What do you think of the changes? Let us know in the comments.

Apple on Monday released Safari 4, the next version of its Web browser for OS X and Windows users. The updated browser will also ship with Snow Leopard once the planned OS X 10.6 update arrives in September.

Safari 4 has been available as a public beta since February, when Apple unveiled the new version of the browser. The new version features the Nitro Javascript engine, which is aimed at improving Safari’s speed.

During WWDC keynote, Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior VP of software engineering, touted the speed improvements to Safari, claiming the updated browser can execute JavaScript nearly eight times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3. Safari 4 can also load eight pages three times faster than IE and Firefox, according to Apple’s figures.

Safari 4 will run as a 64-bit application in the forthcoming Snow Leopard update. That will further boost the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine.

Also in Snow Leopard, Safari 4 will offer a crash-resistance feature by running plugins as a separate process. he leading cause of crashes in OS X comes from browser plug-ins, Apple says; in the new version of Safari, if a plugin crashes, only that part of the page will be broken, while the browser will remain open.

Other improvements in Safari 4 include a Top Sites feature that gave users a visual preview of frequently visited pages; Full History Search for finding titles, Web address, and text of recently viewed pages; and a Cover Flow view for browsing bookmarks. Safari 4 Beta’s tabs-on-top feature, where Web page tabs were located at the very top of the window, is gone in the final release. Instead, tabs have returned to where they were in Safari 3, immediately below the bookmarks bar.

The new version of Safari includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies as well as support for advanced CSS Effects. According to Apple, Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, which looks at how well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML, and SVG standards designed specifically for dynamic Web applications.

Safari runs on Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later and requires Security Update 2009-002. Apple says Safari 4 is available for download at its Web site.

Opera Mobile 9.7 beta is now available to accelerate the mobile browsing experience for Windows Mobile-based phones. Speed is at the heart of this beta release due to the addition of Opera’s recently launched technology for faster surfing, Opera Turbo. Opera has also included its newly upgraded browser engine, called Opera Presto 2.2, for faster page loads and better overall performance. With the added bonus of Opera Widgets, Opera Mobile 9.7 gets you the Web content you want in fewer clicks and less time.

“There are other mobile browsers on the market that claim to be faster and more Web site-compatible on Windows-based phones, but I challenge users to take Opera Mobile for a test drive and discover a new standard for speed and compatibility.” says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “Opera Mobile 9.7 leaves other “sluggish” and “painfully slow” browsers in the dust.”

Opera Mobile 9.7 beta features a mobile version of Opera Turbo. This turbo-charged technology is made possible by -

• Server-accelerated rendering – Opera Mobile unburdens the mobile phone of its full rendering responsibilities by off-loading this task to Opera servers. This frees device resources, thus improving download rates and overall performance.
• Compression technology – Opera Turbo uses advanced compression technology to speed up data transfer and to reduce the amount of data that needs to be downloaded by up to 80 percent. This means that despite network shortcomings or in the absence of a powerful device, Opera Turbo enables a fast and rich browsing experience that is even faster than the most advanced 3G phones.

Opera’s latest rendering engine, Opera Presto 2.2, is under the hood of Opera Mobile 9.7 beta. It’s rendering engine helps display Web pages on your phone up to 25% faster. Opera Presto 2.2 is the same rendering engine used in Opera’s desktop browser.

“It is our belief in One Web that challenges us to develop technology such as Opera Turbo. Not everyone owns a 3G phone and not everyone needs to. This is why Opera’s focus is on improving our browser so that your EDGE network feels like you’re surfing 3G style or better,” Tetzchner adds.

With widgets growing in popularity and prevalence, Opera Mobile 9.7 beta includes the add-on Opera Widgets manager and Opera Widgets SDK. Through the add-on Opera Widgets manager, Opera users can access their favorite services with just one click, including the following pre-installed widgets: GeoQuiz, Twitter, Bubbles, MyStatus, Google Translate. http://widgets.opera.com

Market Adoption
For operators and manufacturers, Opera Mobile 9.7 delivers a powerful, consistent and compatible mobile Web experience on Windows Mobile-based phones.

While operators are able to lower bandwidth costs and expand network capacity to deliver data services, manufacturers can install Opera Mobile on a wide range of phones by offloading the rendering to Opera servers. As a result, less memory is required on the phone, which reduces component cost.

Availability
Currently available for Windows Mobile-based phones. To download Opera Mobile 9.7 beta, go to http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/ while the Opera Widgets SDK can be availed  at http://dev.opera.com/sdk/