The war of browsers

2000/05/01 Waliño, Josu - Elhuyar Fundazioa Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Internet

What was the first, the egg, or the chicken? In this case there is no doubt: the first was Netscape. The well-known navigator launched in 1996 had the primacy of the market in the first beginnings of the Internet. Then Microsoft came into play with its famous Explorer and the aggressive campaign carried out has led him to eat the market to Netscape for a couple of years. However, it seems that Netscape (don't forget that this company has been bought by the great AOL) wants to re-enter the game and just released version 6 of its browser. Nor has it been chance to publish the new version: The new version 6 of Netscape was opened the same day the litigation ruling against Microsoft was published. The truth is that it was time, since since 1997 we had version 4.x while Microsoft was permanently updating Explorer.

But, in the meantime, have there been no other competitors? So yes, but simpler. There are other browsers on the market that, although they do not compete with the two giants, are able to produce at least a little headache. In addition to occupying much less space these browsers need less memory to work. This is the case of the Opera browser that has just released its version 4. This browser meets market standards (HTML 4.0, HTTP 4.0, XML, WML, JavaScript 1.3, SSL, etc.) In addition to the versions for Windows and Linux, the version for Macintosh has been announced shortly.