In the beginning, the internet was a tool used by academics and researchers to gather information. You had to have special training to know how to navigate and publish content. In order for the internet to become more user friendly it needed a way for users to be able simply navigate it without the extensive training that was needed. To fix this lack of accessibility a new type of program was invented, the Internet Browser. The first Internet Browser, created in 1990 called WorldWideWeb or Nexus, used a Graphical User Interface or GUI, to display information. But Nexus was still not very user friendly.
In 1993, two computer programmers, Marc Andreessen and Jamie Zawinski, created the first true internet browser, Mosaic, which all current browsers are based on. With Mosaic, users were able to view multimedia pages that contained both text and graphics. Mosaic opened the doors for casual users of the internet to view information in a clear visually appealing manner. As Mosaic grew in popularity and profitability, it was further developed and eventually branched off to become the Netscape Navigator. Netscape was highly successful and helped to usher in the internet consumer revolution. Seeing the potential profitability, other companies soon decided to venture into the Browser Marketplace.
The behemoth that is Microsoft, saw the popularity of Netscape as a threat to their dominance in the software space. They quickly designed and developed a browser of their own, Internet Explorer. With Internet Explorer, Microsoft provided users with a competitor to Netscape, and in order to achieve total dominance in the Browser Marketplace, they decided to provide Internet Explorer as a free internet browser. Internet Explorer would be bundled with the Microsoft Operating System and would be the default browser available to all of its users. Through this strategy, Internet Explorer was able to effectively guarantee Netscape’s demise. In order to try to survive, Netscape was sold off to AOL where it was used as the platform’s official browser. Ultimately, it was discontinued in March of 2008.