One of the better tech news sites out there in Ars Technica ("the art of technology") and I follow their stories religiously. Their long-form articles are always of the highest quality, and they very discerning on which "breaking news" stories they cover. If it is just some silly web trend, it probably won't show up in their site.
Today they posted a feature article on IE9, which just saw its beta release. Inside the article is a wonderful history of web browsers, which makes well worth the read.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/09/inside-internet-explorer-9-redmond-gets-back-in-the-game.ars
In beating Netscape, Microsoft may have brought about the death of mainstream, commercial browsers, but in so doing, it also planted the seeds for a new breed of open source browsers. As a last-ditch effort to remain relevant, Netscape open-sourced its browser. This wasn't enough to save Netscape, but that open-source effort evolved into the browser now known as Firefox. Open source was also instrumental in the creation of both Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome. They both use the WebKit rendering engine, an open-source derivative of the also open-source KHTML engine.
Many people will know me as a promoter of browser other that IE. This is only true to the point that I use, and encourage others to use, tools that work. With the new IE9, it looks like there will be one more tool in my kit. By the way, I teach in a browser-neutral environment.
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