Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Internet Browser Timeline
Microsoft responded with its browser Internet Explorer in 1995 (also heavily influenced by Mosaic), initiating the industry's first browser war. By bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft was able to leverage its dominance in the operating system market to take over the Web browser market; Internet Explorer usage share peaked at over 95% by 2002.[4] The usage share of Internet Explorer has declined from over 62.1% in January 2010 to 57.1% in December 2010 according to Net Applications, and it continues to decline.[5]
Opera first appeared in 1996; although it has never achieved widespread use, with a browser usage share that has fluctuated between 2.2% and 2.4% throughout 2010,[5] it has a substantial share of the fast-growing mobile phone Web browser market, being preinstalled on over 40 million phones. It is also available on several other embedded systems, including Nintendo's Wii video game console.
In 1998, Netscape launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive browser using the open source software model. That browser would eventually evolve into Firefox, which developed a respectable following while still in the beta stage of development; shortly after the release of Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, Firefox (all versions) accounted for 7.4% of browser use.[4] The Firefox usage share has slowly declined in 2010, from 24.4% in January to 22.8% in December.[5]
Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003; it has a dominant share of Apple-based Web browsing, having risen from 4.5% usage share in January 2010 to 5.9% in December 2010.[5] Its rendering engine, called WebKit, is also running in the standard browsers of several mobile phone platforms, including Apple iOS, Google Android, Nokia S60 and Palm webOS.
The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Google's WebKit-based Chrome, first released in September 2008. Its market share has quickly risen; its usage share has nearly doubled from 5.2% in January 2010 to 10.0% in December 2010, and appears to be gaining further in the coming months.[5]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)