Out of my memory: we were using a number of different browsers in the early 90s, mainly Mosaic. All of them basically shared a little problem: their HTTP call were blocking. So they first downloaded the HTML code, then one image per time (no CSS, no JS back then). And nothing appeared on screen until they finished to download everything.
Netscape Navigator started to render the text of the page and add images when they became available. That was an instant success and everybody was using Netscape in a few days. I don't remember if it also made parallel requests or if that came with a later release.
Netscape also had a bundled email client, which I used as my main client (is Brave doing something like that now? Opera did have one), and a Usenet news reader. Version 2 added the first version of JavaScript.
Then Microsoft started to put some effort into Internet Explorer but it took them at least version 4.0 to reach feature parity. I remember a Microsoft evangelist wondering at an event why everybody was still using Netscape when IE was so good. They didn't say that about IE 3.0. Version 5 was definitely better than Netscape and won't the browser wars. All of that with the help of the behaviors that were subject of the anti trusts trial in the late 90s.
They didn't know it yet but IE 5 made the history because it introduced XMLHttpRequest, that is Ajax calls. That transformed the web more than anything else.
Then IE 6 came, an improvement over IE 5 and nothing happened for a while. Feature wise it was stagnation as Microsoft probably had no competitors to fend off anymore.
Then the early versions of Firefox were released between 2002 and 2003. It had tabs and it was so much faster than IE 6 that whoever could switch, did switch. Corporate users often had to stick to IE 6 because of certifications of web apps, impossibility to install software except what mandated by their IT support, etc, so IE 6 made it through at least another 10 years well, despite new versions from Microsoft.
Mozilla was created by Netscape before selling to AOL so in a way it's a successor of Netscape but I doubt there was some shared code. They extracted Netscape's email client to a different program, Thunderbird.
Then Google Chrome happened and it was faster than Firefox, especially for large JavaScript sites. Not that Firefox was so slow not to be able to use those sites (I kept using Firefox for all those years) but it was faster, it was advertised on Google's search results page so people switched in mass. As a result we had a few years of huge improvements in the speed of JavaScript engines, Chrome, Firefox and every other browser.
I believe the UI of Chrome is noticeably more snappy, which largely contributes to the feeling of it being speedier. The PR was about how their Javascript engine was faster, but I doubt that was what really made any difference for most people.
The Firefox suite was written in XUL, which is Electron-like but faster and especially tailored for desktop software. It's fast, but not as fast as native UI. Given the choice, almost everyone went with the speedier UI. At least that was my completely unscientific feeling back then. There's probably something to learn about UX here that very few people care about.
Netscape Navigator started to render the text of the page and add images when they became available. That was an instant success and everybody was using Netscape in a few days. I don't remember if it also made parallel requests or if that came with a later release.
Netscape also had a bundled email client, which I used as my main client (is Brave doing something like that now? Opera did have one), and a Usenet news reader. Version 2 added the first version of JavaScript.
Then Microsoft started to put some effort into Internet Explorer but it took them at least version 4.0 to reach feature parity. I remember a Microsoft evangelist wondering at an event why everybody was still using Netscape when IE was so good. They didn't say that about IE 3.0. Version 5 was definitely better than Netscape and won't the browser wars. All of that with the help of the behaviors that were subject of the anti trusts trial in the late 90s.
They didn't know it yet but IE 5 made the history because it introduced XMLHttpRequest, that is Ajax calls. That transformed the web more than anything else.
Then IE 6 came, an improvement over IE 5 and nothing happened for a while. Feature wise it was stagnation as Microsoft probably had no competitors to fend off anymore.
Then the early versions of Firefox were released between 2002 and 2003. It had tabs and it was so much faster than IE 6 that whoever could switch, did switch. Corporate users often had to stick to IE 6 because of certifications of web apps, impossibility to install software except what mandated by their IT support, etc, so IE 6 made it through at least another 10 years well, despite new versions from Microsoft.
Mozilla was created by Netscape before selling to AOL so in a way it's a successor of Netscape but I doubt there was some shared code. They extracted Netscape's email client to a different program, Thunderbird.
Then Google Chrome happened and it was faster than Firefox, especially for large JavaScript sites. Not that Firefox was so slow not to be able to use those sites (I kept using Firefox for all those years) but it was faster, it was advertised on Google's search results page so people switched in mass. As a result we had a few years of huge improvements in the speed of JavaScript engines, Chrome, Firefox and every other browser.
I think you know what happened next.