Back then, sort of a big thing.

It's still possible today to find sites that tell us that they're "best viewed with ..." but on the whole the ongoing competition between the companies that produce web browsers doesn't seem to concern users. This may be because Chrome has succeeded in dominating the market, or because many users don't even know what a browser is and when they click on a browser icon simply assume that they're opening "the internet". Way back when the web was still rather young, in 1998 to be precise, one of the hottest issues was the browser wars. By packaging Internet Explorer as an integral part of Windows, Microsoft pretty much assured itself market dominance, and began the rather inevitable process of pushing Netscape, until then the leading browser, out of the picture.

One of the significant events in that process, or perhaps one of the significant aftereffects of that process, took place on this day in 1998. The Computer History Museum site notes that:

America Online announced the acquisition of Netscape Communications in a stock-for-stock transaction worth $4.2 billion.
But the This Day in Tech History site gives us some important background:
At the time it was considered a move by AOL and Netscape to merge forces to better compete with Microsoft in the browser and Internet provider markets. However, Microsoft’s dominance in the personal computer market could not be stopped and the Netscape browser lost almost all marketshare to Internet Explorer.
The final battle in the first, and probably most significant, browser war had been fought.



Go to: The tailless wooly internet behemoth.