Browser Wars, Internet Marketing Wars to scramble market part 2

Consequences

The browser wars encouraged three specific kinds of behavior among their combatants.

1. Adding new features instead of fixing bugs: A web browser had to have more new features than its competitor, or else it would be considered to be "falling behind." But with limited manpower to put towards development, this often meant that quality assurance suffered and that the software was released with serious bugs.
2. Adding proprietary features instead of obeying standards: A web browser is expected to follow the standards set down by standards committees (for example, by adhering to the HTML specifications) in order to assure interoperability of the Web for all users. But competition and innovation led to web browsers "extending" the standards with proprietary features (such as the HTML tags and ) without waiting for committee approval. Sometimes these extensions produced useful features that were adopted by other browsers, such as the XMLHttpRequest technology that resulted in Ajax.
3. Inadvertently creating security loopholes: In the race to add development features, the line between document and application is crossed, and the Active Content Exploit is born. This is because, whenever applications have been allowed to masquerade as documents (e.g. Master Mode, Office macros, etc.) anyone can slip malicious code into what is otherwise a trustworthy format. As a virus scanner can only detect a virus that is old enough to be catalogued (usually more than 48 hours), it cannot protect against a zero day attack. Thus this blurring of the boundary between application and document creates an easy access point that is the basis for delivery of nearly all of today's drive-by downloads and auto-loading malicious code.
   

Support for web standards was severely weakened. For years, innovation in web development stagnated as developers had to use obsolete and unnecessarily complex techniques to ensure their pages would render properly in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Netscape Navigator 4 and IE6 lacked full compliance with several standards, including CSS and the PNG image format.
On February 2, 2008 the last update to Netscape Navigator 9 was released, based on Mozilla Firefox 2. However, it never regained its market share. Netscape was discontinued on March 1, 2008.

The second browser war

Usage share of non-IE web browsers according to Net Applications:      Firefox      Safari      Opera      Netscape      Mozilla      Chrome      Other

After the defeat of Navigator by Internet Explorer, Netscape open-sourced their browser code, and entrusted it to the newly formed non-profit Mozilla Foundation—a primarily community-driven project to create a successor to Netscape. Development continued for several years with little widespread adoption until a stripped-down browser-only version of the full suite was created, which included features, such as tabbed browsing and a separate search bar, that had previously only appeared in Opera. The browser-only version was initially named Phoenix, but because of trademark issues that name was changed, first to Firebird, then to Firefox. This browser became the focus of the Mozilla Foundation's development efforts and Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released on 9 November 2004. Since then it has continued to gain an increasing share of the browser market.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 would be the last standalone version of its browser. Future enhancements would be dependent on Windows Vista, which would include new tools such as the WPF and XAML to enable developers to build extensive Web applications.
In response, in April 2004, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software joined efforts to develop new open technology standards which add more capability while remaining backward-compatible with existing technologies. The result of this collaboration was the WHATWG, a working group devoted to the fast creation of new standard definitions that would be submitted to the W3C for approval.

2006–2007

On 15 February 2005, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 7 would be available for Windows XP SP2 and later versions of Windows by mid-2005. The announcement introduced the new version of the browser as a major upgrade over Internet Explorer 6 SP1.
Opera had been a long-time small player in the browser wars, known for introducing innovative features such as tabbed browsing and mouse gestures, as well as being lightweight but feature-rich. The software, however, was commercial, which hampered its adoption compared to its free rivals until 2005, when the browser became freeware. On 20 June 2006, Opera Software released Opera 9 including an integrated source viewer, a BitTorrent client implementation and widgets. It was the first Windows browser to pass the Acid2 test. Opera Mini, a mobile browser, has significant mobile market share as well as being available on the Nintendo DS and Wii.
On 18 October 2006, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7. It included tabbed browsing, a search bar, a phishing filter, and improved support for Web standards – all features familiar to Opera and Firefox users. Microsoft distributed Internet Explorer 7 to genuine Windows users (WGA) as a high priority update through Windows Update. Typical market share analysis showed only a slow uptake of Internet Explorer 7, and after statistics in September 2007 from w3schools.com showed Mozilla Firefox at 35.4% had taken over from Internet Explorer 6 at 34.9% as the most popular browser with Internet Explorer 7 lagging behind in third place at 20.8%, Microsoft dropped the requirement for WGA and made Internet Explorer 7 available to all Windows users in October 2007.




On 24 October 2006, Mozilla released Mozilla Firefox 2.0. It included the ability to reopen recently closed tabs, a session restore feature to resume work where it had been left after a crash, a phishing filter and a spell-checker for text fields.

In 2003, Apple had begun work on a new browser to replace Internet Explorer for Mac, as Microsoft announced on 13 June 2003 it was discontinuing their browser on the Mac platform. Basing the rendering engine on the open-source KHTML rendering engine from the Konqueror project, Apple created the WebKit project and a browser named Safari, which shipped with Mac OS X v10.3 later that year. On 6 June 2007, Apple released a beta version of Safari 3 for Microsoft Windows.

On 19 December 2007, Microsoft announced that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid2 CSS test in "IE8 standards mode" – the last of the major browsers to do so.

On 28 December 2007, Netscape announced that support for its Mozilla-derived Netscape Navigator would be discontinued on 1 February 2008, suggesting its users migrate to Mozilla Firefox. However, on 28 January 2008, Netscape announced that support would be extended to 1 March 2008, and mentioned Flock, alongside Firefox, as an alternative to its users.

source : wikipedia, W3C, ISO, Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla, Apple