History of The Internet & World Wide Web. Chapter 4. Birth of the World Wide Web

1992

The portable browser is released by CERN as freeware.

Many HEP laboratories now join with servers: DESY (Hamburg), NIKHEF (Amsterdam), FNAL (Chicago).

Interest in the Internet population picks up.

The Gopher system from the University of Minnesota, also networked, simpler to install, but with no hypertext links, spreads rapidly.

We need to make a Web browser for the X system, but have no in-house expertise. However, Viola (O'Reilly Assoc., California) and Midas (SLAC) are wysiwyg implementations that create great interest.

In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers.

A few people noticed that the
Web might be better than Gopher.

In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois.

Several million then suddenly noticed that the
Web might be better than sex.

In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape...

Life in the browser wars

I started work on Spyglass Mosaic on April 5th, 1994. The demo for our first prospective customer was already on the calendar in May. ... Yes, we licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA (at the University of Illinois), but we never used any of the code. We wrote our browser implementations completely from scratch, on Windows, MacOS, and Unix.

... Netscape didn't even exist yet, but things happened fast. Just a few weeks after I started coding, Jim Clark rode into town and gathered a select group of programmers from NCSA. Mosaic Communications Corporation was born. It was interesting to note that certain people on the NCSA browser team were not invited to the special meeting. I can still remember hearing about how ticked off they were to be excluded. Champaign-Urbana is a very small town.

Spyglass had the legal right to the "Mosaic" trademark. A few tantrums and lots of lawyering later, MCC changed its name to Netscape.

We thought we had a nice head start on Netscape. We had a really top-notch team and we moved the rest of our developers over to browser work quickly. We were ready to compete with anybody. But Jim Clark was, after all, Jim Clark. His SGI-ness knew how to work the advantages of being in Silicon Valley. He provided his young company with lots of press coverage and very deep pockets.

We decided to approach this market with an OEM business model. Instead of selling a browser to end users we developed core technology and sold it to corporations who in turn provided it to their end users. We considered ourselves to be the arms dealer for the browser wars. Over 120 companies licensed Spyglass Mosaic so they could bundle it into their product. Our stuff ended up in books, operating systems, ATM machines, set-top boxes, help systems, and kiosks. It was an extremely profitable business. The company grew fast and ours was one of the first Internet IPOs.

Along the way, we got involved in the standards process. In fact, I became the chair of the IETF HTML Working Group for the standardization of HTML 2.0. I learned a lot through this experience. In May 1994 I went to the first WWW conference in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee took me aside and shared his plans for a World-Wide Web Consortium. It didn't take too long for the W3C to become the venue for HTML standards discussions. Eventually this was A Good Thing. Both Netscape and Microsoft became active participants in the W3C HTML Working Group. Any group which didn't have their involvement was doomed to irrelevance.

For much of 1994, it seemed like we were ahead of Netscape. Shortly after we released our 2.0 version, I remember one of the Netscape developers griping about how their schedule had been moved up by six months. We smiled because we knew we were the reason. They had not been taking us seriously and they were being forced to do so.

But Netscape was running at a much faster pace. They got ahead of us on features and they began to give their browser away at no cost to end users. This made Netscape the standard by which all other browsers were judged. If our browser didn't render something exactly like Netscape, it was considered a bug. I hated fixing our browser to make it bug-compatible with Netscape even though we had already coded it to "the standard". Life's not fair sometimes.

We won the Microsoft deal. I suppose only the higher echelons of Spyglass management really know the gory details of this negotiation. I was asked to be the primary technical contact for Microsoft and their effort to integrate our browser into Windows 95. I went to Redmond and worked there for a couple of weeks as part of the "Chicago" team. It was fun, but weird. They gave me my own office. At dinner time, everyone went to the cafeteria for food and then went back to work. On my first night, I went back to my hotel at 11:30pm. I was one of the first to leave.

Internet Explorer 2.0 was basically Spyglass Mosaic with not too many changes. IE 3.0 was a major upgrade, but still largely based on our code. IE 4.0 was closer to a rewrite, but our code was still lingering around -- we could tell by the presence of certain esoteric bugs that were specific to our layout engine.

Licensing our browser was a huge win for Spyglass. And it was a huge loss. We got a loud wake-up call when we tried to schedule our second conference for our OEM browser customers. Our customers told us they weren't coming because Microsoft was beating them up. The message became clear: We sold our browser technology to 120 companies, but one of them slaughtered the other 119.

The time between IE 3 and IE 4 was a defining period for Spyglass. It was clear that the browser war had become a two-player race.

IE team had over 1,000 people

I was stunned. That was 50 times the size of the Spyglass browser team. It was almost as many people as Netscape had in their whole company. I could have written the rest of the history of web browsers on that day -- no other outcomes were possible ...

Memoirs From the Browser Wars by Eric W. Sink.

According to Gary Wolf, "Andreessen also left the NCSA, departing in December 1993 with the intention of abandoning Mosaic development altogether. He moved to California and took a position with a small software company. But within a few months he had quit his new job and formed a partnership with SGI founder Jim Clark.

"At the NCSA," Andreessen explains, "the deputy director suggested that we should start a company, but we didn't know how. We had no clue. How do you start something like that? How do you raise the money? Well, I came out here and met Jim, and all of a sudden the answers starting falling into place."

In March, Andreessen and Clark flew back to Illinois, rented a suite at the University Inn, and invited about half a dozen of the NCSA's main Mosaic developers over for a chat. Clark spent some time with each of them alone. By May, virtually the entire ex-NCSA development group was working for Mosaic Communications (it was an original name of the Netscape Communications -G.R.G.).

Andreessen answers accusations that corporate Mosaic Communications "raided" nonprofit NCSA by pointing out that with the explosion of commercial interest in Mosaic, the developers were bound to be getting other offers to jump ship. "We originally were going to fly them out to California individually over a period of several weeks," Andreessen explains, "but Jim and I said, Waita second, it does not make much sense to leave them available to be picked up by other companies. So we flew out to Illinois at the spur of the moment."

Since Mosaic Communications now has possession of the core team of Mosaic developers from NCSA, the company sees no reason to pay any licensing fees for NCSA Mosaic. Andreessen and his team intend to rewrite the code, alter the name, and produce a browser that looks similar and works better.

The Anti-Gates

Clark and Andreessen have different goals. For Jim Clark, whose old company led the revolution in high-end digital graphics, Mosaic Communications represents an opportunity to transform a large sector of the computer industry a second time. For Andreessen, Mosaic Communications offers a chance to keep him free from the grip of a company he sees as one of the forces of darkness - Microsoft.

"If the company does well, I do pretty well," says Andreessen. "If the company doesn't do well" - his voice takes on a note of mock despair - "I work at Microsoft."

The chair of Microsoft is anathema to many young software developers, but to Andreessen he is a particularly appropriate nemesis...

As I ( Gary Wolf) reviewed my notes from interviews with Andreessen, I was struck by the thought that he may have conjured the Bill Gates nemesis out of the subtle miasma of his own ambivalence. After all it is he, not the programmers in Redmond, Washington, who is writing a proprietary Web browser. It is he, not Bill Gates, who is at the center of the new, ambitious industry. It is he who is being forced by the traditional logic of the software industry to operate with a caution that verges on secrecy, a caution that is distinctly at odds with the open environment of the Web."

Bill Gates : "...an Internet browser is a trivial piece of software. There are at least 30 companies that have written very credible Internet browsers, so that's nothing... "

Question : Netscape has certainly come on awfully strong.
Bill Gates: How many software developers do you think they have?
The world according to Gates By Don Tennant, InfoWorld Electric, Jan 4, 1996.

Month

Netscape Navigator

Microsoft Internet Explorer

May-96

83.2%

7.0%

Jun-96

78.2%

8.3%

July-96

72.6%

15.8%

Aug-96

62.7%

29.1%

1990

1991

1992