Everything You Need to Know About Internet Browsers

Browsers have been evolving for more than three decades, and that history explains a lot of the technical decisions we take for granted today.

The early years

The first widely adopted graphical browser was Mosaic (1993), which popularized the idea of viewing text and images combined on the same page. Netscape Navigator followed shortly after, dominating the market through much of the 90s.

That era also brought the first "browser war," with Microsoft pushing Internet Explorer bundled into Windows. The result was years of fragmentation, where the same page could look completely different depending on the browser used — something that still shapes how web standards are designed today.

The modern engine era

In the mid-2000s, Firefox arrived, followed later by Chrome, both taking a much more aggressive approach to speed and consistent standards compliance. Chrome introduced the V8 engine, which made JavaScript execution orders of magnitude faster — and that performance leap is one of the reasons it's viable today to build complex applications that run entirely in the browser.

Where we are today

Most modern browsers — Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera — share the Chromium engine, while Safari uses WebKit and Firefox maintains its own engine, Gecko. This concentration into a handful of engines has simplified web development, but it also fuels debate about how much engine diversity is healthy for the ecosystem.

Why it still matters

Understanding this evolution helps explain why certain web APIs take years to standardize, why "works in my browser" is still a common phrase among developers, and why testing across multiple engines — not just Chrome — remains a necessary step before shipping any web product.