Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first web browser named WorldWideWeb in 1990 while working at CERN in Switzerland. This initial software served as both a dual-purpose editor and viewer to allow users to create and modify pages directly within the interface.
The Mosaic web browser was released to the public in April 1993. This release introduced a graphical user interface that allowed images and text to coexist on the same page, making the web easy to navigate for the average person.
The market share of Internet Explorer peaked at over 95% in the early 2000s. Microsoft gained this dominant position by bundling Internet Explorer with its popular Windows operating system as freeware with no restrictions on usage.
Mobile devices have represented the majority of web traffic since late 2016. As of February 2025, mobile devices represent a 62% share of Internet traffic, followed by desktop at 36% and tablet at 2%.
A study from 2020 identifies Brave, DuckDuckGo, and Firefox-Focus as privacy-focused browsers that perform better than popular ones like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. These browsers block fingerprinting, cookies, tracking scripts, ads, and other invasive technologies to protect user anonymity.
Starting in the mid-2020s, browsers with integrated artificial intelligence capabilities known as AI browsers have become increasingly common. Examples include Perplexity Comet, ChatGPT Atlas, Chrome with the Gemini chatbot, and Edge with the Copilot chatbot.