Browser Wars: All Over Again, For The Very First Time, Always

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When people ask me about my work history, I warn them, “I’m much older than I look. How far back do you want me to go?”

If they foolishly say, “start at the beginning,” I don’t usually regale them with stories of late-night pellet gun target practice on quiet nights inside the dining area at Wiarton’s Pizza Delight.

I don’t usually include the story of the time I almost killed Dave Nixon with a fridge while delivering appliances for Wiarton Pro Hardware (“Dave, I can’t hold the fridge. RUN!”).

I start by telling them about my time at York University’s Computer-Assisted Writing Centre (CAWC), an arts and humanities computer lab for essay writing and other computer literacy training. It was a time when a surprising number of people didn’t know how to use a computer mouse.

I began working at the CAWC in my third year of university in September 1994 (over thirty years ago).

The lab was situated on the top floor of the Scott Library.

The elevators kinda sucked.

It was routinely a better life choice to walk up the monolithic flights of concrete stairs to get to the lab.

While working at the CAWC, I taught myself HTML.

I taught myself how to use Photoshop.

I got familiar with Mac OS, Windows 3.1, UNIX, and all kinds of other software.

I became an expert at repairing broken electric staplers and paper-jammed laser printers.

I learned to teach myself complex technical things quickly and immediately turn around and teach what I learned. A skill that has proven invaluable ever since.

And I gifted a lot of free document printing to students who were desperate to submit their essays to unforgiving professors on time.

One afternoon, I asked Cheryl (our lab director) if I could convert a workstation into a web server.

I’m not sure if she knew exactly what I was asking.

But she said yes.

I downloaded the free web server software from CERN. And with the help of one of the other lab monitors, Joel, we opened up some ports and accidentally launched the university’s first website.

It wasn’t pretty.

But it provided us, the lab monitors, with a sandbox to experiment in, allowing us to tinker with web design and host early versions of web resumes.

Probably one of the first more administrative IT-ish things I did at the lab was assist with the installation of Netscape on all the lab’s workstations.

Before Netscape, we were running Marc Andreessen’s NCAS Mosaic web browser.

Mosaic was a paid piece of software.

Netscape had just begun offering its browser for free. Free!

That would be the last time you or I or anyone would pay to use a web browser.

Mosaic was unique at the time because there were versions for every hardware operating system. Mosaic is now an Internet history footnote.

Internet Explorer came a year later, bundled with Windows 95, which would later prove to be a problem for Microsoft. But they survived.

Netscape exploded into wide usage when it launched. It lives on in the skin of Mozilla’s Firefox, a shadow of its initial market share.

Microsoft dominated the browser space for a decade with Internet Explorer. Then, it transformed IE into Edge and then rebuilt Edge on Chromium, an open-source project based on Google's Chrome browser.

Web browser software is so ubiquitous and integrated into our use and understanding of the Internet that most people are likely unaware of what it is.

I suspect that a lot of mobile-only or mobile-first Internet users only understand the web as “Safari” or “Chrome”, a browser hegemony that has stood firm since the launch of the iPhone (and Android).

But the web browser is ground zero for data collection.

Own the browser, own the data that passes through it.

As AI companies seek out additive sources of data beyond web scraping, image rendering, video content, and book theft to feed future large language models, a potential next best source, literally at the source, is what people browse on the web and the things they key into their web browsing software.

The sites you visit.

The video content you view.

Things you type into private documents.

The emails you’ve written (even if you never send them).

Your browser data is invaluable.

Would you be willing to share it all with an AI tool if the promise was that it could make that browsing experience better?

It could help you with mundane tasks. Schedule events, write for you, know your needs and wants and help you manage your day-to-day stuff.

It could be an actual virtual assistant. Not a glorified voice-activated light switch and song selector like the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

Even if the cost for these fabulous future services is the loss of any level of personal data privacy?

Probably, yes.

Sign me up.

Which is why we are at the dawn of a new browser war.

Chrome and Safari are already being challenged by new browsers from Opera, Perplexity, and Arc (the Browser Company).

OpenAI announced that it is working on a browser project.

This week, Bloomberg reported that Apple has plans for a new “web answer engine” that likely integrates with (or swallows whole) Safari and Siri.

Microsoft already put Co-Pilot into Edge. And no one cared.

Google has already integrated Gemini into Chrome. No one noticed.

A quarter of a century after Microsoft’s legal problems with Internet Explorer, Chrome would also prove to be a problem for Google. But they survived.

This latest browser battle is far from over.

In the interim, be careful where you browse.

Because your AI friend doesn’t forget.

It will know you by your trail of clicks and the content you consume.

And if you need your electric stapler fixed, you know where to find me.

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