Browser Version Timeline
Way back in March of 2007, I moderated a SXSW panel called “A Decade of Style”. As part of the introductory material, I created a browser-history timeline in Keynote, spread across two slides. I’d always meant to throw it up on the web for general edification and reference purposes. So I finally have, in a slightly simplified visual format (the original had a parchment-like background and so on).
In the end, the web form of this is pretty simple, even though it wasn’t simple to produce. It’s just a series of images, one per year. I have in mind a way to do it without the images, which would be nice, as that way the information would be accessible to the blind. Right now, all the images just have empty alt values, I’m sorry to say. Besides which, creating the same timeline out of structured content would be a fun challenge, albeit one I really don’t have the time to tackle right now.
A few notes:
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Internet Explorer has two lines, one for Windows and the other for Macintosh. I did this because their release schedules often had little or nothing to do with each other. The other browsers represented typically release cross-platform on or about the same day, and so each got a single line.
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The temporal resolution is one month. In other words: no, I didn’t attempt to place the vertical connector bars so they correspond to the specific day of the month a browser was released. In many cases, I don’t have that information—just the month and year of release.
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I was interested to discover that the “quietest” years in the timeline were
1999, 2002, and 20041999 and 2002. (My earlier belief that 2004 was quiet was due to my having the wrong year for the release of Netscape 7.2. Um, whoops.) -
Because the timeline was created for a session about CSS, the timeline starts in 1996 and doesn’t include pre-CSS browser versions. I may extend it backward at some point, although that introduces interesting questions like whether or not to include Mosaic, Viola, Cello, and so forth; and whether to extend it all the way back to 1989.
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Yes, I’m missing browsers such as Konqueror and iCab, not to mention the whole forest of Gecko spin-offs like Camino and Flock. Again, there’s the question of which browsers to include and which to omit. This was dictated partly by perceived market share, but mostly by good old-fashioned laziness.
I’ll do my best to address any suggestions for improvement, though this is kind of a side project and so commands a comparatively small share of my attention. Still, even if it never changes again, I’m happy that it’s finally out into the world.
