In the mid-1990s Netscape Navigator dominated the new World Wide Web. Microsoft, which had been slow to recognize the importance of the internet, responded by building its own browser, Internet Explorer, and bundling it free with the Windows operating system. The contest between the two browsers became known as the first browser war.
The fight ended up in a United States courtroom. The government’s antitrust case against Microsoft, decided by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, produced detailed Findings of Fact in November 1999. The findings describe how Microsoft moved to foreclose Netscape’s browser from the market, including contractual restrictions on PC makers that forced them to take Internet Explorer with Windows and forbade them from removing or obscuring it. The court found that Microsoft tied Internet Explorer to Windows so tightly that removing the browser’s files would cripple the operating system.
Netscape lost. As “JavaScript: The First 20 Years” notes, by 2000 Netscape was in rapid decline, and its founder of the JavaScript language, Brendan Eich, had moved on to other projects. But one thing Netscape created outlived the company: JavaScript, the scripting language built into Navigator, had already become a permanent part of the web.
Years later a second browser war broke out, this time among Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Google Chrome. The renewed competition pushed browsers to support faster JavaScript engines and newer web standards, and it reshaped which companies controlled the everyday experience of the web.