BROWSER WARS 2020
We suspect most readers remember with bitterness and rolling of eyes the Browser Wars of the year 2000 (okay, perhaps it’s more like 1995, but we like round numbers). Back when websites were websites, adorned with user-unfriendly “Compatible with Netscape” logos and “Under Construction” animated GIFs, that took an age to load over crawling 56K modems. Entire websites that only worked with a flashy plug-in, and Microsoft breaking standards left, right and centre to gain market share. Great days, if by great you mean awful.
You have to hand it to Microsoft – and, indeed, Bill Gates – who foresaw the dominant role the web browser would play in the future, and yet still managed to throw away that market-dominating position to some underdog called Google.
Why does it even matter which web browser we choose? Why has the browser become so powerful? What makes a web browser tick, and is there really any difference between them? All of these questions and more will be answered as we dive inside the web browser, benchmark a bunch of them, and ask Jonni, “Should we be sticking with the browser shoved in front of us by globe-spanning corporations?” Hint: No.
We’re not about to take you back to 1993 and explain the history of the world wide web, aka Web 1.0. That’s done and dusted – thanks, Tim Berners-Lee. We’re
