One of the most commonly used applications in the modern world is the humble Internet browser. It is therefore unsurprising that such a large amount of attention is focused on the current ‘browser war’ which currently encompasses a number of big players, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

To understand the importance of these developments, we need to look back at the first browser wars which began back in the mid 1990’s, just as the World Wide Web started to receive a huge amount of mass media and public attention.

At the time Netscape Navigator was the dominant player, and had been for many years after improving on the reliability and usability of the Mosaic browser that had been created in the early 1990’s. Netscape had gained such widespread use of their product by offering evaluation copies of Netscape either on CD or via download free of charge so that users could try the product before handing over any money.

Unfortunately the fortunes of Netscape quickly changed when Microsoft released Internet Explorer towards the end of 1995. After licensing Mosaic as the basis for Internet Explorer 1.0, they released it as part of the Windows 95 Plus! Pack and then released Internet Explorer 2.0 just months later. Both companies released new versions of their respective browsers at a rapid rate over the coming years before Microsoft hit a winner by releasing Internet Explorer 4 in October 1997.

After the IE 4.0 launch party, Microsoft employees did what could be considered as ‘getting personal’ by dumping a huge ten foot high, three dimensional ‘e’ logo that had been used for promotional material on the front lawn of the Netscape offices in the early hours of the morning. Netscape employees promptly tipped the ‘Explorer’ logo over and placed their seven foot tall dinosaur mascot atop of it, holding a sign saying ‘Netscape 72, Microsoft 18’ which referred to their respective market shares at the time.

This market share wasn’t set to remain though. Internet Explorer was completely free of charge and came bundled with all new versions of Windows so at this point most users had very little reason to go out and pay for a Netscape offering. The browser was also faster and rendered pages more faithfully to the W3C standard than Netscape Navigator 4.0.

With a bottomless pit of money in the Microsoft coffers that was set aside for winning this battle, the relatively small company Netscape stood little chance. After a number of questionable business decisions they were defeated by the end of 1998 and were acquired by AOL for $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer became the new dominant browser and enjoyed a market share which peaked at approximately 96%.

What happened next is a perfect example of how a lack of competition can often stagnate innovation and breed complacency. With no immediate threat in the marketplace, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 in 2001 and said that this would be the last standalone version that Windows XP users could download; future updates would require users upgrading to Windows Vista when it was released.

In an event which heralded in the second browser war, Microsoft was forced to backtrack on this stance when Firefox gained a relatively large amount of market share extremely quickly. An incredible five years after the release of version 6, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 which was available as a standalone update for Windows XP, and was also included as part of the Windows Vista Operating System. It seemed that Firefox had got their attention and that development of the IE platform was once again a priority for Microsoft.

We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future but next week we’ll look at the current state of play in the midst of this second browser war and how it could affect you, the end user.

I remember [...]]]> The great thing about computer geeks has to be the passionate way that they can either loyally defend or implacably slate a particular system; fanatics are polarised so much by two competing platforms that only very rarely can some kind of sensible middle ground ever exist.

I remember when I was younger, talk in the playground often turned to which console was best, your Sega Megadrive or your mates Super Nintendo – You can guarantee that if I were a fly on the wall in a school today, that the same kind of discussion would still be raging between the X-Box and Playstation gamers.

A similar kind of discussion, ‘which is superior, the PC or the Apple Mac?’ has been burning between adult computer users for several decades now. Personally I don’t have the time to worry about the issue a great deal, nor do I feel the need to militantly argue my points in forums all over the Internet but clearly many enthusiasts do; a simple Google search for ‘PC vs Mac’ returns hundreds of thousands of matches.

The debate has been taken to a new level by a series of adverts recently commissioned by Apple in which the two comedians Mitchell and Webb take on the rolls of the two systems; Mitchell acts as a PC and Webb as an Apple Mac.

In these adverts the two ‘systems’ compare their features and of course, PC comes off looking like a a boring, inefficient dinosaur while Apple Mac humiliates him and generally comes off looking a little too smug. I’m not certain that any of the adverts would tempt me to move over to the Apple Mac platform but I suppose the real question is, if you look behind the advertising, is the Mac really better?

So we can understand the two platforms a little better we should probably look at how they have developed and changed over the years. Hopefully this will somehow justify Apples name calling and rationalise them insulting pretty much everything about the machine that the large majority of us use on a daily basis.

What most users would come to term ‘PC’ refers to one of the many machines evolved from the original IBM Personal Computer which was introduced back in 1981. The success of this machine can be predominately attributed to the fact that IBM decided on an open architecture so that other manufactures could produce and sell peripherals and software for the machine. The rather loose copyrighting and availability of technical specifications meant that it didn’t take long before other manufacturers reverse engineered the BIOS to produce their own legal IBM PC ‘clones’. This lead to the PC standard being adopted and developed by a number of competing companies which of course had a positive impact on the range of devices and software available for the machine as well as reducing prices.

Nowadays IBM, the original founders of the platform have relatively little influence on the development of the PC as it is continually evolved by the thousands of companies who manufacture the computers, peripherals and software which are compatible with this open standard.

On completely the opposite end of the scale is Apple who released their first Personal Computer, the ‘Macintosh’ back in 1984. Since this time, Apple have been the only company to manufacture, sell and support the Mac which of course means that they have full control over the brand including the Hardware and Operating System.

Whilst retaining complete control over your platform would appear to be a good idea, especially when it comes to monopolising on sales, it has certainly hurt the popularity of the machine in the industry. With so many more companies supporting the PC it has certainly dominated sales over the past twenty years which has resulted in Apple Mac being regarded as very much a niche machine by many.

Fortunes may be about to change however; a partnership with Intel, a new Operating System on the horizon and compatibility with Windows means that many now consider Apple to be a viable option again. Join me again next week to hear my opinion on whether your next computer really should be a Mac…..