The battle of web browsers dates back to 1995, in the time Microsoft internet explorer started competing with Netscape Navigator. From that time until now many browsers came in to battle and some of them manage to mark their territory strongly while some of them lost and retreated. The major contributing factor to win this browser battle was always the speed of loading and data interpretation.

In the new millennium, battle of the browsers has become even competitive and lots of companies are showing their colors to be the first. In this article I’m trying to do a historical data analysis of battle of the browsers and its circumstances.

Early Time

The Very First One – Nexus

Back in 1990 the very early version of web browser came to the picture. In was called as WorldWideWeb and then change the name to Nexus. Today everyone knows it as Nexus. This web browser was capable of interpreting basic HTML and style sheets only in text formats. Further, most of the Common things that we do with browsers were there even with Nexus including spellchecking, next/previous buttons and file download.

Nexus Browser

This is the time just before internet boom. There were no many internet users and most of its users were from various government organizations and academic institutions. They all were using Nexus and its versions. By 1993 other web browsers came in to the world of WWW and Nexus was unable to give a good competition to them. In 1994 January Nexus was discontinued.

Arrival of Netscape Navigator

1993 is a very important milestone for internet. In that year the web browser Mosaic was introduced which was a major contributing factor to the popularity of World Wide Web. The main reason to make the Mosaic popular was that it was the worlds very first graphical web browser which could display images right inside the HTML page. In previous Nexus, users had to open a separate page to view images.

Later this browser was renamed as “Netscape Navigator” with its popularity and further development. This is the first time in history that a Web browser became popular among general internet users and it did a great job in popularizing internet. Netscape introduced innovative technologies to internet mainly Secured Socket Layer(SSL) and Java Script which are used even today with modern web browsers.

Netscape Navigator

By that time there was no significant competition to Netscape Navigator and according to statistics it was holding more than 90% of usage share back in 1994. However with the arrival of Microsoft Internet Explorer the trend of Netscape Navigator died and today it’s only a legend.

Internet Explorer

Microsoft also came in to the browser battle with their Internet Explorer in 1995. When it comes to functionality it was almost same as Netscape Navigator, but they were having other advantages. Mainly it came with the popular operating system Microsoft Windows. hence users won’t have to install a separate web browser. And of course Microsoft always polishes up the product to deliver the maximum user-experience.

This setup initiated the world’s very first Battle of the Browsers. On one side Netscape Navigator was competing with their innovative new technologies such as SSL, JS and even with the advantage of “Be the first to come”. In another side Internet Explorer was competing to gain more territory with Operating System support, market reputation and ease of use.

Microsoft Internet Explorer was able to win this war and Netscape Navigator had to retreat. By 1996 the popularity of Netscape Navigator started to decline while popularity if Internet Explorer was booming. After that Internet Explorer could hold his ground for many years without having any significant competition. The development was continuously going on and many versions of Internet Explorer came with Windows Operating System. This is the most powerful regime ever in history of Battle of Browsers.

Opera

Opera browser came in to the picture in the peak of browser battle and offer competitive feature to the internet users. Especially they were developing web browsers for mobile phones. The most interesting thing about opera browser is its performance. By that time speed of networking infrastructure was around 28 Kbps and managing the bandwidth was critical. Opera was offering the feature ‘fast rewind’ which allows the users to go to previous pages quickly without wasting data.

Opera Browser

However, opera never was able to gain a significant usage share. It was always fluctuating around 2%. I still recommend this as a very good browser if you are having slower internet connection. By the time I was using Dial up internet this was my favorite browser. But with the introduction to broadband internet the importance of Opera was not significant.

In New Millennium

Mozilla Firefox

The era of Internet Explorer was continued for many years and its users were satisfied with its capabilities. Mozilla Firefox is the very first browser which shows some new possibilities to the Internet Explorer users becoming a new competitor in battle of browsers.

The Mozilla Foundation was initially launched by Netscape, the early competitor in the battle of browsers. The idea was to set up the environment to develop open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer. It gave birth to Firefox and first version came in 2004. This came in with lots of new features such as Tabbed browsing that allows you to open many web pages in the same browser window, spellchecking, bookmark manager and download manger. Furthermore the browsing engine of Firefox is very fast due to the technologies like ‘pipelining’. With all these Mozilla Firefox could gain a usage share of nearly 40% in 2011 and limit the share of Microsoft Internet Explorer to 21%.

Safari from Apple

Safari browser came with Apple Mac operating system. Safari was having the same advantage as Internet Explorer since it comes with a popular brand and operating system. Initial version of Safari came in 2003 and of course gained popularity among Apple Mac users. It was having fastest browsing engine which was even faster than Mozilla Firefox and providing lots of competitive features as well. However it was unable to gain a significant usage share due to its limited platform compatibility. Throughout years its usage share was fluctuating between 5-10%.

Safari Browser

Chrome from Google

Chrome was developed by the internet giant Google and became very popular with the massive online promotion campaign and competitive features. Chrome introduced the “Tabs On top” style screen arrangement which is very user-friendly. In addition to that Chrome engine was very fast and ranked as world’s fasted browser. Additionally most of the Google features came built in with the Chrome browser which was an added advantage to become even popular as a web browser.

Right after introduction its usage share hit the roof and most of the people believed that it will surpass the share of Mozilla Firefox as well. But according to the statistic in w3schools it’s still slightly behind the Firefox browser. Different sources come up with different browser usage statistics. I’d like to stick to w3schools browser statistics. In there you can see the browser usage share by browser and different version of the same browser as well.

Recently there was news reported by many online news sources saying that Google Chrome has surpassed the usage share of Mozilla Firefox.

Effect of the Browser Battle

The Battle of web browser gave lots of good things to the users. Competition is always good. The major factor that improved throughout the years was mainly user-friendliness and performance. Even in the very early time Netscape won the war against Nexus due to the user-friendliness and performance. Along with those lots of new technologies were introduced to deliver excellent browsing experience such as Java Script, Flash and Silverlight. Lots of updates came for HTML and browsers were fighting to be the first to support those especially with HTML 5. With the arrival of Mozilla Firefox, browsers went open source and through community development lots of interesting features were added to the browser. At the same time it opens the opportunity to make the browser cross platform compatible. Today we can install Firefox and Chrome in many operating systems and hardware platforms.

The Battle of browsers didn’t give only the white side. There are some problems that came with this war as well. The major problem is increased browser incompatibility. In other words different browsers interpret the same mark up in different way which is a major problem for web developers and confusion to internet users. This occurred due to proprietary technologies that used to make the interpretation faster by different companies. The problem continues even today.

I always see the Battle of web Browsers as a good thing. It gave lots of good things compared to few drawbacks. In the future the war will continue mainly between Firefox and Chrome. Result will always be beneficial for the users since both browsers come for free anyway.

Getting started

In order to use Google Webmaster tools you have to have a Google account. If you have one you can visit Google Web Master Central and Sign in to Google web master tools. Once you sign in it will take you to Google Web master tools home. In there you can add your web site by simply clicking the ‘Add a site’ button and enter the URL. Once you add the site it will appear in the list below. And as the next step you have to verify the ownership of the web site. It provides various ways to do it including META tag, HTML file of DNS record. Simply follow the steps and you might take a look at the example there, finally click verify. Till you very ownership you won’t be able to access any further information about the web site. Now from the Web master tools home you can access the tools for web site by clicking it name in the list. In addition using the list you can add remove owners of the web site and at the top messages sent by Google Web master tools will be displays. These messages might contain details about security threats.

Features

Dashboard

When you click on the name of the web site out of the list it will take you to the Dashboard. It will contain the summary of all the details about your website. That will include Search queries, incoming links, crawl errors, keywords detected and site map status. By clicking on more links in each section you can go to a details view. Furthermore you can add these gadgets to iGoogle home page as well.

Site Configuration

Site configuration is one of the most important sections in Web master tools. As the first section it will allow you to add a site map of your web site. It will make it easy for Google to crawl in to the pages. Once you add a site map it will take some time to access it and after that it will display number of pages indexed and various other details. In the section crawler access you can see the status of robot.txt in your hosting space which you can use to restrict Google bot by accessing some part of the web site. There is a feature to text your pages against the current robot.txt and where various Google bots can access it. Furthermore it provides facility to generate new robot.txt according to your special requirement and remove unwanted indexed URLs. Site link section will display auto generated links which may appear in the search result, just below the main link. Change of address section provides facility to change the domain name of your web site in proper way. Finally the settings section allows you to set geographical target, select preferred domain and set a custom crawl rate if its required.

Your Site on the Web

This section displays information gathered by Google bot over a period of time. Search queries display the number of search queries which your site was on, click through rate and many other useful information to optimize your pages even better for search engines. Links to your site displays number of incoming links you have for your web site and its pages. It provides details about number of links, anchor text and originated pages. Keywords section displays keywords in your web site according to its significance. Internal link section provide information about the links between pages in your web site while subscribe state displays number of users subscribed to your RSS feeds using a Google product.

Diagnostic

Diagnostic is a very important section for web masters to identify the errors and security threats to the web site. The first section ‘Malware’ will display if there are any illegal activities in your web site may without knowing. If such a case this information will be important to remove the malware and make your site safer again. If there are such threats a message also will be generated and it will be displayed web master tools home. Crawl errors section displays any identified errors in your web site by Google bot. By correcting those you can expect a better crawling efficiency in your web site. Crawl status displays a chart about the number of pages crawled per day, bandwidth used etc. This information can be used to fine tune your hosting environment properties. HTML suggestions section gives ideas to further improve SEO factors in your web site including Title, URL and duplicate content etc.

Labs

This section contains relatively new features to Google Web master Tools which are still in experimental stage. Fetch as Google bot gives idea how the Google bot see your page. Normally what we see is Browsers interpretation of the HTML code. But What Google bot sees is raw HTML code. Using this you can identify how it is and fine tune it to gain better search engine appearance. Side wiki is a newly introduced feature which mainly comes with Google Tool bar which provide platform to write comment about the web pages by users. Those wiki notes would be a highly accurate factor to measure the quality of the web page. In here it provides facility to enter the page owner’s wiki note about the main page of the web site. Recently Google has improved the ranking algorithm to identify most useful pages to its users. During that process ‘Performance’ of the web page also considered as a quality factor. In this section ‘Site performance’ you can figure out the performance level of your web site and improve it accordingly.

Further Usage

The idea behind this tool is Google want to index more pages as possible. They don’t want to index lesser pages or omit any pages from index. At the same time they need to deliver the most useful pages to their users and that’s why they continuously improve the algorithm with various quality factors. All the web masters can use Google web master tools and identify the weaknesses in their website and help to make the World Wide Web a better place by improving those. In addition if you have Videos in your web pages you can prepare a video site map and submit it to Google web master tool. If that be the case your pages will be listed in Video search results. You can identify the popular search queries to your web site and improve the click through rate by fine tuning titles, description etc. Finally you can use the information given by this tool to come up with innovative ideas and take the competitive advantage in World Wide Web.

Intro To Python

From the external glance Python is a server side scripting language like Perl, PHP. Let’s talk about this, so what is a server side scripting language and what are other scripting languages that are currently on the job other than this server side scripting languages? Well server side means that the code you write (scripting) executes on the server side (web server) rather than client side (browser). Examples for client side scripting languages are JavaScript, VB script. The specialty of python is the flexibility, lightweight, high-level and, well it can be use as an OOP (Object Oriented Programming) language. Some may refer Python as a scripting language some may refer it as a programming language anyway the context of the whole idea is still the same. Now at the inner state Python has a collectable adoption within the industry, in the early 1990 that was Guido van Rossum created the language, since then is has been grown steadily and the concentration has increased remarkably in past few years. Python is used extensively for system administration tasks (it is, for example, a vital component of several Linux distributions), but it is also used to teach programming to complete beginners. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) use Python both for development and as a scripting language in several of its systems. Industrial Light & Magic uses Python in its production of special effects for large-budget feature films. Yahoo! uses it (among other things) to manage its discussion groups. Google has used it to implement many components of its web crawler and search engine. Python is being used in such diverse areas as computer games and bioinformatics. Google’s latest innovation, the Google Wave’s server is also implemented using Python called Pygowave.

What Is Django And What’s It Origin?

We can simply describe that Django is a web framework that 100% built using Python. That’s it, it’s really a framework that built for convenience and to reduce the time consuming efforts. Out of the box Django is very conceptive and robust basically the environment, so the developers only have to focus on how they going to implement a certain web application using Django, main considerations that affects a web application. Let’s see how Django is invented (the origin), Django grew organically from real-world applications written by a Web-development team in Lawrence, Kansas, USA. It was born in the fall of 2003, when the Web programmers at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison, began using Python to build applications The World Online team, responsible for the production and maintenance of several local news sites, thrived in a development environment dictated by journalism deadlines. For the sites including LJWorld.com, Lawrence.com, and KUsports.com journalists (and management) demanded that features be added and entire applications be built on an intensely fast schedule, often with only days or hours notice. Thus, Simon and Adrian developed a timesaving Web-development framework out of necessity it was the only way they could build maintainable applications under the extreme deadlines. So if we look at the context of this situation, they invent this framework in order to simplify and to speed the development process of their web applications, that underline concept is the hall way to Django’s success within the industry.

Django’s Current States And Capabilities

Now, several years later, Django is a well-established open source project with tens of thousands of users and contributors spread across the planet. Two of the original World Online developers (the “Benevolent Dictators for Life,” Adrian and Jacob) still provide central guidance for the framework’s growth, but it’s much more of a collaborative team effort. This history is relevant because it helps explain two key things. The first is Django’s “sweet spot.” Because Django was born in a news environment, it offers several features that are particularly well suited for ecommerce site like Amazon.com, Craigslist, and The Washington Post that offer dynamic, database-driven information. Don’t let that turn you off, though, although Django is particularly good for developing those sorts of sites, that doesn’t preclude it from being an effective tool for building any sort of dynamic Web site. (There’s a difference between being particularly effective at something and being ineffective at other things.).Let’s take a look at Django’s most conceptual capabilities.

Based On Model View Controller (MVC) Design Pattern

Although Django is based on MVC design pattern the way it uses the naming for the pattern is bit different

• Models (Model) – abstract the used data by defining classes for them and storing them on a relational database
• Views (View) – take the job of the controllers in MVC and basically define, what the user get to see. Functions (functions that changes according to the model) not classes here.
• Template (Controller) – Define how the users see the view.

Division Of Easiness And Maintainability (Applications And Projects)

Give developer a more modularize way of manipulating the web application’s parts

• Application – this is the point where you store actual functionality. For example a discussion forum would be an application; a weblog would be an application.
• Project – A project is for example your whole web site (entire outcome). Here you store your central configuration and general templates and images.

Applications are a simple way to share common functionality between various projects.

Easy Start

• Python (Django can work above the version 2.5)
• A text editor

This is all what you need to start developing with Django frame work, because it ships with a light weight development server (NOT suitable for production environment) to play around with it.

Yet Flexible

• Fast CGI (Common Gate way interface) – Common Gateway Interface, a specification for transferring information between a World Wide Web server and a CGI program. A CGI program is any program designed to accept and return data that conforms to the CGI specification. The program could be written in any programming language, including C, Perl, Java, or Visual Basic. Django itself support better processing metrology to up holds a fast CGI surrounding.
• mod_python – is an Apache module that embeds the Python interpreter within the server.
• mod_wsgi – is a simple Apache module implementation which can use to host any Python application which supports the Python WSGI interface.

Supports Most Common Database Engines

• SQLit
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Oracle

Main Features Resides On Developers Perspective

• A good collection of contributed applications
• Administration interface
• Authentication system
• Comments system
• Template language focused in inheritance.
• Simple form processing.
• Lots of fun stuff.

Summery

As you can see Django is a more convenient and easy to handle web framework purely built using Python, once you have mastered Django it will simply speed up your application development process and enhance the usability of your application through easy maintainability. Django can be used to develop small-scale corporate web application to expandable ecommerce web applications (this is just a surface markup which means Django can be use to develop further more complex web applications, don’t judge it from the outside view). So Django is currently available as an open source product (under BSD license) all developers, architects and fun makers are invited to use it and experience emphasize power of it.

• The latest official version is 1.1.1 – can download form here
• Documentation can be found in the following link (for installation instructions and sample applications.)
• Support + Community can be found here (also there’s a good ticketing system and IRC channel)

References

• Holovaty, A. (2009). The Definitive Guide to Django (Second edition). Apress.
• Home page. (2010). Retrieved from Django project: http://www.djangoproject.com/
• TERM/C/CGI.html. (2010). Retrieved from webopedia: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/CGI.html