Firefox Becomes World’s Most Popular Web Browser

December 22, 2009 - 1:04 pm

The Mozilla Firefox web browser has finally turned the tables in a battle that has been taking place for over a decade. We look at the history that brings to this day to ask why it’s an important moment.

In the early days of the World Wide Web there weren’t many ways to view web pages. The first browser was created by father of the web Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, and it was called… WorldWideWeb. Over the next few years more browsers were made available, but things didn’t start to hot up until around 1996.

It was in the era of Windows 95 that things got interesting, and two big rivals rose up – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator. The two browsers, both in version 3.0 by then, battled it out for supremacy on Desktop PCs. Efforts to be “the best” included extensions to the language of the web – HTML – to enable page creators do to cooler things on their sites, such as scrolling text.

Remember when half the web looked like this? Terrible times.

And while those of us who’ve been using the net for long enough have fond memories of the frankly tacky pages that existed back then, it was a disaster for the web. It meant that page creators couldn’t guarantee what pages would look like on a visitor’s computer. Sites had to declare which browsers “worked best” with their site and sometimes pages wouldn’t work at all.

Eventually Internet Explorer “won” the battle (thanks in part to it being bundled with Windows, which has since got Microsoft into trouble). And so it was the de-facto browser – everybody made pages that worked with it.

But from the ashes of Netscape rose a Phoenix – a web browser that sought to observe web standards, introduce new ways of browsing, and be better than the competition – functionally and philosophically. And it was. Microsoft, having won the first browser war, had become complacent, and let its browser sit stagnant and undeveloped.

IE6 is soooo 2001

Slowly, starting with the nerds (who else?) uptake of Phoenix grew. It had to change its name to Firebird, and then again to Firefox, at which point momentum was building. Office workers were learning about “tabbed browsing”, faster page loads and fewer crashes. People were moving away from IE.

Fast forward to today, and look what has become of the browser market. The latest version of Firefox has, according to Statcounter, become the most used browser the world over, and one might argue that its success acted as a catalyst for other browsers to rise up too – such as Opera and Apple’s Safari, and now of course Google Chrome.

Once again we have a choice, and Microsoft is responding to the threats by improving its own browser – making it more standards compliant, faster, and introducing new features. The web is in better shape again.

Since the rise of a new wave of competing browsers, Microsoft has upped its game once more.

But despite this progress, IE 6 – now a 9 year old browser – still holds 15% of the browser share, sitting on millions of old, un-updated Windows XP computers. It is the bane of any web developer’s existence – making the coolest new sites work in IE6 is a pain at best and nothing short of a nightmare at worst.
But some day… some day… IE 6 will fizzle out into insignificance.

So whatever browser you’re viewing Remember Kingston in right now (and thank you for coming!), know that you have a choice, and that thanks to that choice, the web is now a much safer, faster, friendlier place.