Interesting little piece of internet history. I remember starting with Internet Explorer, then the Firefox, Safari for a bit and I use Chrome now.
This is a pretty gimped retelling of internet history. The author fails to mention several browsers that made history, most notably Opera, which came out back in '95. Opera was notable for being the first to introduce several features which have now become staples in modern browsers, such as:
- Tabbed browsing
- Speed Dial for fast access to favorite sites
- Pop-up blocking
- Reopening recently closed pages
- Private browsing
- Advanced UI customisations, such as the ability to set custom keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures for various actions
Opera contributed so much to the web that it’s almost criminal that it’s left out from an article on browser history.
There were also several notable browsers which made history, such as:
- Lynx, the world’s oldest browser that is still being maintained (released in '92)
- Minuet, an early DOS-based TUI browser (HTML 1.0 only), released’ 94
- Arachne, an advanced GUI browser for DOS, released '96
- Neoplanet, the first fully-skinnable browser, based on IE, released’ 97
Oh, I agree. It could have gone into more detail. But still an interesting, if brief overview.
Missing from this is a little known side story. Konqueror, the KDE browser on linux. Circa 2000, KDE wrote their own browser from scratch, with a new rendering engine, called KHTML. KHTML was forked to become Webkit, the underlying engine behind Safari, and later forked again to become the first Chromium engine. In many ways, all of the major browsers, except Firefox, owe their current heritage to KDE. Opera, which still exists surprisingly, also uses Webkit.
The really funny thing here is the name, Konqueror. Navigator, Explorer, Konqueror. ;)
Check if your browser’s user agent says “KHTML” in it
“This would lead to Microsoft being taken to court by the U.S. government for illegally restricting PC makers and users from uninstalling Internet Explorer.”
Something Microsoft would violate again and again even after this point. Does anyone remember the days that Microsoft has practically woven Internet Explorer into it’s own Windows OS code during the days of XP and since? You never could truly uninstall Internet Explorer, it always had a presence somewhere on your system.
