[tyingq]

Much, much, earlier if you squint a little. 1998.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

"The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine"

-> "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives"

-> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."

Not browser specific, but they understood the problem well.

[xpct]

Thank you for sharing this. I imagine at first it wasn't clear that the browser will become our primary interface with the web. Microsoft hoped it would be the OS itself with Windows 98, if I'm not mistaken.