We suspect most readers remember with bitterness and rolling of eyes the Browser Wars of the year 2000 (okay, perhaps it’s more like 1995, but we like round numbers). Back when websites were websites, adorned with user-unfriendly “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 centre 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 managed to throw away that market-dominating position to some underdog called Google.