Web browser wars (1993-2026)

I was born before the world wide web, which still feels strange to say out loud now that the internet has become the background to almost everything we do. But I remember its arrival clearly. I remember Netscape. I remember the groan and hiss of dial up connections. I remember arguments over the phone line with my mum because going online meant nobody else could use it. I remember chat rooms, MSN Messenger and the first thrill of realising that this strange new space was not just something to consume, but something you could build.

Like many people of my generation, I learned by tinkering. I taught myself bits of HTML. I wrestled with Java and ran it through a compiler just to get “hello world” onto a screen. None of it felt polished or inevitable at the time. It felt clunky, slow and full of friction. But it also felt wide open. You could sense that something important was happening, even if nobody could yet see the scale of what it would become.

I watched the web emerge, then spread, then quietly take over. It changed how we communicate, how we work, how we learn and how we waste time. It changed business, media, culture and memory itself. Today it is so deeply woven into life that it is almost impossible to imagine the world without it. I can imagine it, because I lived in it. And the truth is, it was not so bad. Life before the internet was slower, more local and in some ways more limited, but it was also more bounded. When the web arrived, it did not just add convenience. It altered the texture of everyday life.

That is the story behind this data visualisation. It is not just a timeline of browsers, platforms or technologies. It is a map of a period that shaped me. It traces a big part of my life through the rise of the internet and the strange way a tool that once felt new, disruptive and almost playful became the infrastructure of modern existence. As I worked on it, the piece evolved into something more personal than I expected. It became a way of marking the distance between the early web I encountered and the vastly different digital world we now inhabit.

What makes it even more meaningful for me is that I built it using Eeagli, the chart studio I am launching. In a way, that feels fitting. I learned to code in the early days of the web by experimenting and making things from scratch. Now I am building tools to tell stories visually in a digital world that those early years helped create. The medium changed. The instinct did not.

When I showed the visualisation to my children, the generational gap became instantly obvious. They recognised parts of it. They knew Chrome. They liked the Firefox logo. They did not know what Edge was. For them, the internet has never arrived because it has always been here. There was no before. No waiting for a connection. No sense that this was a new frontier opening up in front of you. Only the assumption that the world is already connected.

Perhaps that is what makes this story worth telling. The web did not just transform society in the abstract. It divided experience into before and after. Some of us remember the crossing. Others were born on the other side.