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I have read some History of Browser articles. From what I remember, Marc Andersson who as a student at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign wrote the first GUI Browser - Mosaic. Mosaic was free & shipped with Windows & also a few Unix systems. Andersson then founded Netscape as a for profit company & wrote Netscape from scratch. Netscape did very well as a paid browser. But then Microsoft developed Internet Explorer & started shipping it installed out of the box free with Windows. Now no one would pay money for Netscape anymore. So Netscape also became free. But since IE was out of the box with Windows, people wouldn't bother to download Netscape & use it since they already had a working browser IE - this was essentially the antitrust case against Microsoft. So Netscape as a company got shutdown & Mozilla came out of it as a non-profit, free, open source browser. Mozilla got bloated over time & I think some people forked Mozilla & created Firebird as a lightweight version of Mozilla. But then there was already some other software (not browser) which had the trademarked name Firebird. So Firebird was later renamed to Firefox.

But the legacy will continue through Microsoft Edge as Internet Explorer Mode lol:



Cheers!

I still use Thunderbird for mail.

I used Firefox since what seemed like for ever, even though it can't have been. I stuck with it for many years, and only changed when there became no choice in some of its design configuration, like, for instance, putting the tab headers in the wrong place.

Held out as long as I could, then shifted to Firefox fork Pale Moon. That's where I still am.

But, it seems that Google have taken over from MS's bad behaviour, and a lot of stuff is written with Chrome features needed. The dream of a standards-based, browser independent internet is as a dead now as it was when MS wielded its monopolistic fist. Just recently, it has become a bit too common an experience to encounter sites that don't work on Pale Moon.

I think this poll needs to be revised as Chrome is still listed as "the new kid on the block."

Speaking of Chrome, has anyone else felt that it has become very RAM-heavy lately? It consumes about 400 MB while running on my 8 GB laptop and hangs like heck.

Lately? There is a running joke in tech circles that having 1TB RAM is good to have in your systems if you want Chrome to have more than one tab open.

Amul special doodle on Internet Explorer retirement after 27 years.

This part is slightly misrepresenting the facts. While it is true that Andreessen (note the spelling) was the co-author of Mosaic, he wasn't the sole author. And it did not ship "with" Windows of the time.

Windows in those days (1993-ish) did not even have TCP/IP networking capability out of the box. It got its first browser (Netscape) several years later.

Yes, Eric Bina was the co-author.
Mosaic was released in 1993. Check History of Winsock here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock#Specifications
Mosaic was ported to Windows in Sept 1993 - https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TimB...d/History.html

Right .. this looks to be pretty old lol:

Edge is missing
Brave is missing

Winsock did not ship with Windows "out of the box". We had to borrow floppies of the TCP/IP stack and install it on individual computers if there was a need to connect a Windows computer outside of our (then) Netware LANs. The first version of Windows that had TCP/IP out of the box was I think Windows 95, after SP1 or whatever it was called in those days.

Whereas, Linux was pervasive. Mostly Slackware which was another set of floppies. :-)

OK. This I was not aware. I don't think anyone in our lab ever used Mosaic on Windows. We didn't even have many Windows computers in our labs (the only reason to have one was to use ChiWriter, but with the popularity of LaTeX that was also obsolete).

You are probably right. I read the history in articles & was quoting it from memory.

I think Mosaic shipped out of the Box with whichever Windows version first shipped TCP/IP.

Linux was pervasive in 1993?
On the server side, I would assume Unix was pervasive back then. And on Desktop, probably Mac & Windows 3.1. And there wasn't probably a lot of desktops anyway back then.

Yeah, Slackware was released sometime around then. Linux was lapped up by academic institutions around the world, my college was no exception.

But even before that - there were enterprising souls who compiled Linux from source and replaced all dumb terminals in our computer lab with diskless, floppy-booting Linux machines.

In my first year, the computer lab had a CDC-180 running NOS/VE. I don't remember much about this one (we only had an introductory Fortran course). By the time I was in more senior years and had to write code as part of coursework we had Unix access everywhere (Sun workstations and Linux x86's). What I remember is that faculty members got 486 and Pentiums first, while poor students had to make do with their discards.

Hardly anyone used Windows as far as I can recall, though.

When I first encountered cookies as a programmer, it was called session cookies. But I never thought about what non techie users think about cookies, now I know. :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZARmgNzP5L0