- #NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR INTERNET EXPLORER SOFTWARE#
- #NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR INTERNET EXPLORER TRIAL#
- #NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR INTERNET EXPLORER SERIES#
#NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR INTERNET EXPLORER SOFTWARE#
Netscape wanted to get from Microsoft the same technical information that Microsoft distributed to all software developers to enable their products to work with Windows.īut Barksdale said he was told that Microsoft wanted Netscape to stop development of a Windows 95 browser (which was seen as the largest potential browser market), in return for Microsoft agreeing to give Netscape a clear run at the relatively small browser markets for Windows 3.x, MacOS and Unix. Prior to that, in June 1995, there were what Barksdale has described as "play-ball-or-else" meetings between Netscape and Microsoft.
It was not until May 1995 that Bill Gates told Microsoft executives "Now I assign the internet the highest level of importance."įollowing increasing media criticism that Microsoft was falling behind in its adoption of the internet, in December 1995 Gates announced that Microsoft was now taking the Internet seriously, and that its Internet Explorer browser, developed from Mosaic, would be free. In January 1995, Microsoft had just four people working on developing a browser. The same month, Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass, the University of Illinois' contractor to promote Mosaic.Īlthough Netscape may have given the impression that Andreessen invented browsing, they had been developed at CERN in Switzerland, downloaded in Illinois, and only then further developed by Andreessen and others.
The key events are, according to Barksdale's testimony, that Netscape released the first beta version of its Netscape Navigator 1.0 browser in October 1994 and that in December 1994 the final version was released.
#NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR INTERNET EXPLORER TRIAL#
He was at the helm during the browser battles which led to the launch of the anti-trust trial in 1997. That was the year in which James Barksdale arrived from AT&T, becoming Netscape chief executive in 1995.
#NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR INTERNET EXPLORER SERIES#
Soon afterwards, Jim Clark, the co-founder of Silicon Graphics, e-mailed him.Ī series of meetings between the young software writer and the Silicon Valley legend led to the creation of Mosaic Communications, later to become Netscape Communications, in the spring of 1994.
That task took them just six weeks to complete, and shortly afterwards Andreessen moved to Silicon Valley to work for a small software firm. This browser created a user-friendly way of allowing users to find their way around the world wide web. It was in 1992, as an undergraduate working at the University of Illinois National Centre for Supercomputing Applications, that he and fellow student Eric Bina wrote Mosaic, which is acknowledged as the first ever graphical Web browser. The brains behind Netscape was Marc Andreessen. It was its rapid growth, and the threat of domination of the market, which caused Microsoft to use the rough house tactics to get its Internet Explorer browser into a market leading position. Netscape lived to fight another day after being bought by America Online.