First, a little history, for the benefit of those who weren’t around during the infamous “browser wars.” Believe it or not, there was a point, a long time ago, when Netscape Navigator dominated the market. At around version 3 the browser was, for the time, excellent. HTML was simple and relatively pure. Eyeing Netscape’s success in a field that they had previously shown no interest in (Bill Gates himself once dismissed the Internet as a passing fad), Microsoft released their own browser, Internet Explorer (IE), with the sole intention of dislodging Netscape.

IE quickly became popular. Then came a period of flurried activity, with the two browser manufacturers releasing updates to their browser on ever-decreasing time scales. New HTML tags and DHTML extensions were created and then loosely documented. A designer could use these elements, but at the cost of having them fail in the competitor’s browser. A split started to form as pages designed for one of the “big two” browsers would not work in the other.

Netscape released Navigator version 4 in 1997. It was a very poor browser, laced with bugs and new abilities that broke backwards-compatibility. What caused most pain among developers was that it happily blundered into advanced CSS and JavaScript code that it should have had the sense to ignore. Microsoft released the superior Internet Explorer 4, and the tide started to turn very quickly.

Eventually it became obvious that Netscape were fighting a losing battle. Because IE came pre-installed on every Windows machine, most users just used that instead of seeking out alternatives (this is the same problem that plagues any competing browser to this day). By the time Internet Explorer 6 was released, its market share had grown to a high of about 95%.

In the years that followed, lazy or ill-equipped web designers began to design their sites to work only in IE, as making a site look the same in other browsers required a lot of knowledge and effort. This only encouraged users to stick with IE, no matter how many advances were made in other browsers. Even when Netscape belatedly released the vastly improved Navigator 6 in the year 2000, it barely made a dent in the market.

And so, the war ended. Lying in its wake was a web of incompatibilities and sites that only worked in a certain version of one browser. HTML had been blown off course as a structural markup language and was now bloated with presentational elements like the much-maligned font tag. It took years to even begin to undo the damage that had been done.

Happily, things have finally started moving back towards a level playing field. Internet Explorer’s dominancy is no longer absolute, and web surfers now have lots of choice when deciding which browser they should use.