What made Netscape Navigator the default browser of 1995?
Netscape Communications shipped Netscape Navigator in December 1994, months after Marc Andreessen left the University of Illinois team behind NCSA Mosaic. Navigator drew images inline while a page was still loading, which made the web feel like something to use rather than something to study.
Netscape gave the browser away to individuals and educators and charged businesses for it, so the installed base grew far faster than the revenue. That trade looked brilliant on August 9, 1995. The underwriters priced the IPO at $28 a share, buy orders were heavy enough that trading could not open for nearly two hours, and the first print came at $71. The stock touched $74.75 and closed at $58.25, which gave a 16-month-old company with no profits a market value of about $2.9 billion.
Andreessen was 24 years old. Netscape did not want to sell a browser so much as become a platform, a layer sitting above Windows that would reduce the operating system to a detail. Saying so out loud is what turned a software company into a target.
How did Bill Gates decide to go after Netscape?
On May 26, 1995, Gates sent Microsoft's executive staff a memo titled "The Internet Tidal Wave," later entered as a government exhibit in United States v. Microsoft. It named the problem in one line: "a new competitor 'born' on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on."
Microsoft licensed Mosaic code from Spyglass and shipped Internet Explorer 1.0 in August 1995 inside the Windows 95 Plus! pack. It was slow and thin, and almost nobody used it. Internet Explorer 2.0 was better and still lost. Internet Explorer 3.0, released in August 1996, was the first version that competed on features, with style sheets, ActiveX controls, Java applets and JScript.
The decision that mattered was not technical. Netscape charged companies for Navigator. Microsoft made Internet Explorer free to every user, business licences included, and never charged again. One product carried a price and the other did not, and the price was the line that paid Navigator's engineers.
Why did bundling Internet Explorer with Windows work?
Windows ran on more than 90 percent of new personal computers through the second half of the 1990s. A browser that shipped inside Windows therefore reached the buyer before any download could. Microsoft folded Internet Explorer into Windows 95 service releases and then into Windows 98, which arrived in June 1998 with the browser wired into the shell itself.
Contracts finished the job. Microsoft signed computer manufacturers, internet service providers and content companies to carry or promote Internet Explorer, and the Justice Department later established that manufacturers who pushed Navigator risked their Windows licensing terms. AOL, at the time the largest online service in America, agreed in 1996 to build its client on Internet Explorer instead of Navigator in exchange for a position on the Windows desktop.
The share numbers turned inside two years. At the end of 1997 Navigator still held roughly 51 percent of the market against roughly 40 percent for Internet Explorer. On October 1, 1998, The Washington Post printed the result as a headline: Microsoft's web browser had overtaken Netscape's. Navigator never led again.
What did the court say Microsoft actually did?
The United States sued Microsoft in May 1998. On November 5, 1999, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued 207 pages of findings of fact and wrote that "viewed together, three main facts indicate that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power," citing a share of Intel-compatible PC operating systems that was extremely large and stable and protected by a high barrier to entry.
The findings held that Microsoft had used that power against a list of threats that included Netscape, Java, Apple and RealNetworks, and that internal messages showed manufacturers being pressured over which browser they promoted. On April 3, 2000, Jackson ruled that Microsoft had violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. On June 7, 2000, he ordered the company split in two, an operating-system business and everything else.
None of it reached Navigator in time. The D.C. Circuit upheld the monopoly-maintenance finding in June 2001, threw out the breakup and removed Jackson from the case, and the settlement that followed in November 2001 imposed rules on conduct rather than structure. The browser the case was about had already lost.
Who owns Netscape Navigator today?
Nobody sells it or updates it. AOL announced the purchase of Netscape Communications on November 24, 1998 in a stock deal valued at $4.2 billion on the day, and closed it on March 17, 1999, by which point AOL's higher share price put the number nearer $10 billion. AOL was buying the Netcenter portal and the server business more than the browser.
Netscape-branded releases continued as far as version 9, and AOL ended all support on March 1, 2008. The trademark outlived the software. US registration 2027552 for NETSCAPE was filed by Netscape Communications Corporation and has since passed to AOL Inc., then Oath Inc., then Yahoo Inc., which holds it now. For what survives of the name and the portal, see whether Netscape still exists.
The code did better than the company. On March 31, 1998, months before the AOL deal, Netscape published the Communicator source under an open licence as the Mozilla project. The team eventually threw out that codebase and rebuilt from scratch, which produced Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004.
What is left of the first browser war in 2026?
Internet Explorer is gone as well. Microsoft retired Internet Explorer 11 on June 15, 2022, writing that "after 25+ years of helping people use and experience the web, Internet Explorer (IE) is officially retired and out of support," then disabled it through a Microsoft Edge update on supported builds of Windows 10.
Its replacement tells the story. Microsoft Edge is built on Chromium, the open-source engine behind Google Chrome, and carries an Internet Explorer mode for old corporate web applications that Microsoft has said it will support through at least 2029. The company that won by controlling the engine now ships someone else's.
Firefox is the only widely used browser still shipping an engine descended from the code Netscape released in 1998. The rest of Netscape's work is everywhere and nobody notices it: JavaScript, SSL and the HTTP cookie all came out of the company that lost, and every browser opening this page implements all three.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who won the first browser war?
Microsoft won the first browser war. Internet Explorer overtook Netscape Navigator in usage during 1998, having trailed it by roughly 40 percent to 51 percent at the end of 1997, and Navigator never led again. AOL bought Netscape Communications in 1998 and ended support for Netscape browsers on March 1, 2008.
Did Microsoft break the law to beat Netscape Navigator?
A federal court said it did. On November 5, 1999, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that Microsoft held monopoly power in PC operating systems, and on April 3, 2000, he ruled that it had violated the Sherman Act, in part by tying Internet Explorer to Windows to cut Netscape Navigator's share. The D.C. Circuit upheld the monopoly-maintenance finding in June 2001 but cancelled the ordered breakup, and Microsoft settled in November 2001.
Is Internet Explorer still available in 2026?
No. Microsoft retired Internet Explorer 11 on June 15, 2022 and then disabled the desktop application through a Microsoft Edge update on supported versions of Windows 10. The only way to open an Internet Explorer page in 2026 is Internet Explorer mode inside Microsoft Edge, which Microsoft has said it will support through at least 2029.