Releasing CSS

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and to

Love IE7

The mid-’90s marked the emergence of the first browser war, a rapid succession of

browser releases from competing companies or organizations with the aim of

gaining a majority of the usage share by the surfing public.

The first browser to gain a majority of the market share was the Netscape

Navigator (NN).

Microsoft entered the browser market by launching Internet Explorer 1 in August

1995. Three months later, Internet Explorer 2 was released, marking the start of the

browser war.

Through competition and rapid iterations, the IE browser brought a lot to the web

development community. For example, Internet Explorer 3 was the first major

browser to include support for CSS.

However, both major browser vendors created proprietary extensions or

incomplete implementations of web standards in their respective browsers. The

time and frustration spent attempting to create singular, cohesive designs that could

display competently in both IE and NN came to be what web designers would call

simply, Browser Hell.

Browser Wars

Microsoft won the browser war when Netscape failed, for a number of reasons, to

muster a response to the increasing usage share of Internet Explorer, as shown in

Figure 1.

Releasing CSS 2