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Browser war

Submitted by kalpa on Sat, 10/03/2009 - 07:43

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A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content.Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources.

Although browsers are primarily intended to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by web servers in private networks or files in file systems.

The major web browsers are Windows Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera.

The browser wars are present and past competitions for dominance in the web browser marketplace. The term is used to denote two specific periods of time: the competition between market-dominating Netscape Navigator and its eventual defeat by Microsoft Internet Explorer during the late 1990s, and the competition from 2003 onwards between the dominating Internet Explorer and several other emerging browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera and, since mid-2008, Google Chrome.

The web browser wars are over? Think again.

The recent news about Explorer shows that this Era has come to an end, too. We stand at the beginning of the Fift

h Era of browser history. What will it bring?

In the First Era of browser history Mosaic and the other early browsers ruled. The Second Era was that of Netscape dominance. Microsoft's challenge to Netscape marked the beginning of the Third Era, the Heroic Age of the Browser Wars. Netscape's bleeding to death marked the start of the Fourth Era of Explorer dominance.

The first browser war

In mid 1995 Netscape Navigator was the dominant and most widely used web