Web browser market share of all times visualized

Breathtaking, particularly for those of us who lived, fought (and lost) in the Browser Wars of 1996-1998.

I can remember Jim Barksdale, (A southern gentleman, and our beloved CEO) - frequently made references to William Barksdale (Confederate General) - and urged Netscape on to fight, always reminding us, that win or lose, we'd never forget that we fought in the browser wars.

This web page of browser growth history (for all it's probable flaws) is very heartwarming.

i have been in web development sind 1998, and the worst time was 2004 to 2006. whereby 2002 and even 2003 IE 6 was seen as fresh air in the internet (oh, the things you could do), in 2004 the cracks and horrible limitations began to show, and no new version, no better browser, no better internet in sight (mozilla firebird still sucked at that time), 2006 was my personal year of browser depression, and i decided i don't want to code for a living anymore (quit my job, started my first business).

browser share wise, yes, 2012 really is/was the greatest year ever.

Microsoft included it for free with their (at that time monopoly market share) operating system. Entire Divisions of Netscape were terminated when that happened.

It may be hard for people to imagine now, but back in 1996/1997, selling browser software was like selling spreadsheet or word processing software. People paid $50+/copy for their browser. It was a threat to Microsoft (potential alternative application platform) - so they eliminated it (Cut off Netscape's Air supply) - by giving the browser away for free with their operating system - and, because everyone (for most reasonable definitions of everyone) was running Microsoft's operating system on their desktop, there was no longer any need to buy it from Netscape.

It probably didn't help that, by 1998, the Netscape client had a pretty significant technical debt, was no longer a nimble browser, and, if I recall correctly, had been rebranded as "Netscape Communicator" and had all this crufty email/calendar/editing software slapped onto it. If all you wanted was a browser, Netscape was not necessarily the goto product anymore. Even simple things like rendering large tables could freeze up the browser. And it crashed. A lot.

This was before people realized how valuable controlling the search engine/first hop to the Internet would be.

Netscape (Mike Homer?) finally realized that, with it's dying breath, the most valuable asset it had wasn't all the Enterprise Software (Directory Servers, Certificate Servers, Enterprise Web Server, Application Servers, Business Servers) - but, Ironically, "www.netscape.com" - sold to AOL for $4Billion (much of the software being split between AOL and Sun in the ill fated iPlanet experiment) - and, on the last day of trading, was worth $10 Billion (mostly due to to a rise in the stock value of AOL - the deal's value was heavily related to the AOL stock price)

as someone who went to more than one browser war i have to say: as long as there is still some blue in that chart, it's not over. and yes, i'm strongly biased. i would be years younger if ms would give me back the time i wasted with IE bugs/features/rendering/special-needs or whatever they call it.

Brings us to a question in near term. What will Microsoft attempt to do next (other than developing IE10/IE11) to retain their browser market-share?

This? http://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-to-acquire-Mozillas-...

[Update & disclaimer: The page links to a question on Quora which is behind a sign-up overlay for non-users by Quora. I do not work for Quora.]