BROWSER WARS 2020

WE SUSPECT most Maximum PC readers remember with bitterness and rolling of eyes the Browser Wars of the year 2000 (OK, perhaps it’s more like 1995, but we like round numbers). Back when websites were websites, adorned with userunfriendly “Compatible with Netscape” logos and “Under Construction” animated GIFs, that took an age to load over crawling 56K modems. Entire websites that only worked with a flashy plug-in, and Microsoft breaking standards left, right, and center to gain market share. Great days, if by great you mean awful.

You have to hand it to Microsoft—and, indeed, Bill Gates—who foresaw the dominant role the web browser would play in the future, and yet still manage to entirely throw away that marketdominating position to some plucky underdog called, of all things, Google.

Why does it even matter which web browser we choose? Why has the browser become so powerful? What makes a web browser tick, and is there really any difference between them? All of these questions and more will be answered as we dive inside the web browser, benchmark a bunch of them, and ask experts, “Should we be sticking with the browser shoved in front of us by globespanning corporations?” Hint: No.

to take you back to 1993 and explain the history of the world wide web, aka Web 1.0. That’s done