As Google Chrome competition, Neil Mohr takes an in-depth look at what makes a modern browser tick.

Neil Mohr

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.

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 Jonni, “Should we be sticking with the browser shoved in front of us by globe-spanning corporations?” Hint: No.

We’re not about to take you back to 1993 and explain the history of the world wide web, aka Web 1.0. That’s done and dusted - thanks, Tim Berners-Lee. We’re jumping straight into the “today” to explore what makes a modern web browser tick, because the differences are vast. The important question to ask is why? What has changed so much over the past 27 years or so that makes modern browsers so complex?

To kick things off, and to perhaps whet your appetite, just considering the basic high-level functions of a web browser reveals a corresponding high level of complexity. Part of this is the network connectivity to fetch data via HTTP and associated protocols, before you can even consider displaying anything.

Even at this stage in the explanations, what we need to understand is that the world wide web is a precarious stack of standards, piled on top of each other, and transmitted over an international-scale network. If any corporation or nation state decides that it wants to interfere with them, things quickly begin to fall apart. Just take DDoS attacks, or certain countries rerouting all traffic by abusing Border Gateway Protocol (PGP) hijacking. On a more relevant level, if a major browser provider wants to undermine open standards, it certainly can - and definitely has done.