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Browsers.md

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Browsers

  • By November 1992, there were 26 websites in the world, and the web's domain was mainly academia and large industrial research institutions.
  • The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It included buttons like "Home", "Back" and "Forward", as well as bookmark features and image rendering (GIF or HDF). Marc Andreessen was part of the developing team.
  • Mosaic and derived browsers drove the explosive growth of the Web to over 10,000 sites by 1995 and millions by 1998.
  • Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina left the Mosaic team in 1994 to found Netscape, releasing the new browser Netscape Navigator, with its internal code name "Mozilla". The name was either a blending of "Mosaic" and "Godzilla" or short for "Mosaic Killer".
  • Netscape called itself Mozilla/1.0 in the user-agent string, and it came with new features such as frame support. Website developers invented browser sniffing and sent frames to Netscape and no frames to other browsers.
  • When Microsoft launched Internet Explorer, which supported frames as well, they made the browser impersonate Netscape as Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0) so that it received frames as well.
  • In the first "browser war", Internet Explorer defeated Netscape.
  • Netscape was reborn as Mozilla, later Firefox, with its Gecko rendering engine. Again due to browser sniffing by website developers, other browsers started adding "Gecko" to their user-agent string.
  • "Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, [...] and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, [...] and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else." (Aaron Andersen)