The Browser Wars & an Uneasy Peace

It’s been a wild, wild ride getting from the anything goes origin story of the mainstream web—anyone still remember “Netscape Navigator” and “Trumpet Winsock”?—to today’s carefully-curated experience in the age of Interop and using GitHub to achieve spec consensus.

But the relative calm we enjoy today when it comes to progress and feature parity across browser engines perhaps doesn’t quite tell the whole story…there are still threats to an open web which works well for all, protects our privacy, and guards us from bad actors.

In this episode, we look back at the history of the web browser—touching on such memorable moments as the <blink> & <marquee> tags, DHTML with the launch of JavaScript, and the arrival of responsive design for mobile as well as desktop—while attempting to learn from history so that we’re not doomed to repeat it.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• Wikipedia Links:
• Netscape Navigator
• Internet Explorer
  • IE for Mac
• DHTML
• Firefox
• Safari
• Chrome
• Responsive Design
• Sir Tim Berners-Lee on threats to the open web (as reported by The Internet Review)

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:25 Weather Report™
• 2:29 Browser Wars: Origin Story
• 10:34 Round 1: IE wins, early days of JavaScript
• 14:22 IE for macOS was…different
• 17:25 Early interactivity with "DHTML"
• 22:14 Round 2: The rise of Firefox, HTML5, & CSS3
• 28:47 Round 3: WebKit, Blink
• 33:03 Round 3.5: the rise of Mobile!
• 36:48 Round 4(ish): Retiring IE for good
• 38:46 Concerned about ad-tech funding browsers, platform complexity
• 43:29 Threats to the web: the abstractions, not the platform itself
• 48:51 Outro