Research the development of the Internet browser from its invention through to the most popular current browsers. What were the names and manufacturers of the most popular early browsers? How has that changed up to the present time?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working at the CERN laboratory
in Switzerland in 1990, developed the World Wide Web (Web) concept.
He developed a rudimentary Web browser at the same time, but the
system was principally used for transmitting and sharing text. In 1993,
Mosaic 1 was released by the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) as the first graphical Web browser. This was the first
time that graphics could be viewed alongside text. In late 1994, Netscape
appeared on the scene. Netscape was an outgrowth from the original
Mosaic browser (one of the key programmers on the Mosaic project,
Marc Andreessen, founded Netscape). Netscape dominated the browser
world through a process of continuous improvement until 1997.
Microsoft had launched its own Internet Explorer 1 (IE 1) browser, in
1995, but it didn’t compare well to the more popular and effi cient
Netscape browser. By 1997, Microsoft started to take the Internet
seriously and released Internet Explorer 3. This was seen as the fi rst
browser that could compete with Netscape. Over the next three years,
Microsoft and Netscape competed for those new to the Internet. Since
Microsoft could install its browser on any computer using its operating
system, it was seen to draw ahead in popularity. It was seen to have some
technical advantages over Netscape. By the time Microsoft released IE 5,
Microsoft had a dominant product, with signifi cant technical advances
over other products. In 1998, Netscape ceased to compete and released
the source code of Netscape to the Open Source community. From this
small start, the Mozilla project was founded. This project has produced
the capable Firefox 3 browser, a worthy competitor to Internet Explorer 7.