But war begun in earlier 90's with the advent of WWW an hypertext based system. Netscape came with Netscape nevigator and dominated market at that time but soon Microsoft arrived in the market with it's Internet Explorer 2.0. But internet explorer was available for free!!
But now the internet explorer is getting serious threats from various enriched Web browsers!
like they give you facility to return back to the same browsed pages if browser shut down accidently or spellcheckers or options to clear your private data before you even open your browser. Opera's one of the most interesting features is the speed dial feature.that means once you add speed dial to a website, you can simply type in the number of that website in order to access it. If you ever forget what numbers are assigned to which websites, all you you have to do is open a tab and it will give you the speed dial screen. Another feature that comes in handy is the thumbnail feature with regards to tabs. All the user needs to do is to place your cursor over the tabs and a small screen will pop up and give you a miniature version of what is in that tab.
On 17 June 2008, Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 which added a new layout, bug fixes . It also included separate themes for different operating systems and a redesigned download manager.
Google released an open source browser called Google Chrome for Microsoft Windows on December 11, 2008, using the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and claiming a faster JavaScript engine called V8.
Mac OS X and Linux versions are under development. Chrome had a 1.4% usage share by April 2009.
Shrinking market sour toothed microsoft so on March 19, 2009, they released Internet Explorer 8 which added accelerators, improved privacy protection, and a compatibility mode for pages designed for Internet Explorer 7.
NetApplications also reported that, as of April 2009, Internet Explorer had a 66% market share, compared with Firefox's 22% and Safari's 8%, leaving Chrome, Opera and all the others sharing the remaining 4%.In 2009 both Safari and Firefox released versions with advanced Java script Engines
On June 13, 2009 Mozilla released version 3.5 of Firefox which added web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine.This multi polarisation of browser market has opened the gates for new innovatons and developments in the browser market and giving user a new level of browsing the world.