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First Released: 1993
Erwise may be credited as the first graphical point-and-click browser, but Mosaic earns its spot in history as the first popular graphical browser, which helped push the world wide web into the mainstream.
Image Credit: wired.com
Developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), Mosaic was yet another browser for X-Windows on Unix computers. The browser spread initially through newsgroups, which one of the developers would continually monitor and offer support where necessary.
Because the HTML 2.0 specification didn't exist at the time Mosaic 1.0 was released, the browser was lacking many capabilities that would later be part of the specification.
Image Credit: smartcomputing.com
Development began on the second major version of Mosaic in January 1994, almost two years before a final version would be released in October 1995. Mosaic 2.x became the first major browser to support HTML forms, HTML 3 tables, and several HTML 3 Character style elements. It also added support for Internet Explorer's BGSound element. But compared to other browsers, Mosaic was knocked for being "inexcusably slow."
Another version of Mosaic would later be released, but only for the Mac platform.
First Released: 1993
Dave Raggett, whose involvement in the Web began by developing experimental web browsers and servers in 1992, designed the Arena browser a year later to demonstrate the ideas in the HTML+ specification. Arena was the first browser to support background images, tables, text flow around images, and inline mathematical expressions, according to Raggett, and it was very powerful (for its time) at doing so.
Image Credit: w3.org
Arena would serve as a standards testbed by the W3C for HTML 3 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) up until the organization later switched to Amaya.
First Released: 1994
Intended to be a multi-purpose browser, Cello brought native support for the WorldWideWeb, Gopher, FTP, CSO/ph/qi, and Usenet News retrieval, as well as a bunch of other protocols. It was developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, who recognized that most lawyers were running Microsoft Windows while the majority of browsers had been written for Unix or DOS. As such, Cello goes down in history as the first web browser for Windows.
Image Credit: agocg.ac.uk
First Released: 1994
In 1987, IBM introduced its OS/2 operating system for PCs. Seven years later, IBM would serve up its own web browser, WebExplorer, a no- charge download for users of OS/2 Warp 3. In April 1995, IBM would begin bundling WebExplorer in the OS/2 Bonus Pack, a collection of applications stuffed onto a CD and included with Warp.
Image Credit: pages.prodigy.net
In addition to support for HTML 3, WebExplorer also implemented mail and news integration, and users could view their browsing history through an option called WebMap. A "Links" menu would display all of the links on a viewed webpage and organize them in a pull-down menu, which was used in conjunction with IBM's VoiceType voice navigation.
Elisabeth Brittani
June 28, 2011 at 11:46am
This is a nice history of how the web browsers evolved. My knowledge in this matter was limited to Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, unfortunately, although I've heard that lynx doesn't use a lot of memory up. I'm also very interested in the Cloud computing security now.
fangnfljerseys
March 13, 2011 at 10:43pm
Beijing January 18, Chinese President Hu Jintao’s state visit to the buy herve leger United States launched at the same time, local time on January 17 from the start, a striking image of the Chinese national commercials in New York, Times Square in Manhattan, a large outdoor screen of continuous playback. This “China’s national image film - People articles” shows from dozens of prominent herve leger skirt Chinese in all walks of life, with “wisdom, beauty, courage, talent, wealth,” and interpret the image of the Chinese people. In these distinguished delegates, many from sports stars like Yao Ming, Lang Ping, Deng, Ding Junhui and so on. According to U.S. sources, on January 19 at noon, President Hu will attend a luncheon at the U.S. State Department, President Hu Jintao arrived in Washington after the first U.S. official luncheon, Yao Ming and Wang Kai two Chinese sports stars are invited to visit the scene feast, which fully shows that sports have become a Sino-US exchanges an important bridge. In fact, “Sport (sports)” to show the world China has become the image of a heavyweight “card.”
cjbriare
August 29, 2009 at 3:22pm
its cool that the first WWW browser was developed for NeXT Computers! I think he used a NeXT Cube to develop it.
terabytes
August 21, 2009 at 11:08pm
I used Netscape during the Windows 3.1 days and it was pretty good as there were not many options those days. Shifted to IE from Windows 98 and again it was equal to Netscape, but than Netscape was screwed big time or was it a well thought out stragtegy to push in IE. In between tried Opera & a few others but moved back to IE. Than came along Firefox and that changed everything. A highly lite and flexible browser and also free. With it was if you buy windows than only you get IE (whether you want it or not. ). The add-ons are also too good and so is the interface. Tabbed Browsing was introduced way before Microsoft introduced it. Than you had the new Opera and the Safari both are good & now comes Chrome which to is excellent, but still I believe nothing can beat a Firefox, Ok adding the Add ons is a bit troublesome after reinstallation but it is worth the trouble.
My ratings as of now would be as below
1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Google Chrome
3. Safari
4. Opera
5. Internet Explorer. ( use it only if you have to. )
I have installed all 5 on my pc but I use Firefox.
I Jedi
August 19, 2009 at 12:01pm
Would these older browsers be a lot safer to run on now-a-days? Especially the text-chat based ones only?
yourfriendlane
August 19, 2009 at 12:24pm
Anything that can't run JavaScript is probably safer than any modern browser, despite whatever other security holes it might have.
D.E.
August 18, 2009 at 10:20pm
Chrome is quite unappreciated. It is so easy to set up an ideal and customized browser without much fiddling and while it does not have extensions, it does not suffer from the negatives of giving it more to update. One thing I did not enjoy about Firefox was that once I found the extensions/customized it how I wanted it, I had to maintain it from time to time. Chrome takes me all of 3min to set up from installation, to setting it to the default browser, to importing/adding bookmarks, and then customizing the search bar and download locations and presto! I have my custom tailored browser ready to go.
But one thing I really appreciate with Chrome is that I use it to teach people who are computer illiterate how to surf the web. "Uh huh, so click this button twice and now this is your browser. You can type anything into this box here and it will bring it up. Soo Auntie, if you want "soup" recipes, just go on and type it in and hit enter. And you can bookmark this recipe with this button like this. Easy right?"
I dunno, it just goes a long way for me. :)
1337Goose
August 19, 2009 at 10:45am
I have to agree with you on that one, Chrome is really easy to setup. I used Chrome for almost 6 months before (once again) coming back to opera. The cool thing about Opera is that every time you reinstall it, you can just grab all your settings back from Opera's web sync, it's faster than importing your bookmarks back into chrome.
But again, I still love Chrome's fast rendering times, speedy javascript, and overall minimalist yet intuitive interface.
SuperiorBeing
August 18, 2009 at 9:55pm
Unfortunately, even with the plethora of new, advanced, standards-compliant browsers, there isn't a single browser that has every feature I want. I used Opera for a while (9.6 and 10.0), but there isn't any real effective way to add on to the browser like in Firefox, which I eventually switched to. Then I had to install half a dozen addons just to match the convenience of Opera, and some features I still don't have (like minimizing to the system tray).
Maybe Rockmelt will change all of that, but I doubt it.
roland1680
August 19, 2009 at 4:56pm
Minimize any program to system tray with this little known freeware program ( called TrayIt! ). It's a must for any hardcore user. Between this and launchy, I don't have any icons on my desktop and hardly any program windows that sit in the taskbar.
http://trayit.en.softonic.com/
DBsantos77
August 18, 2009 at 9:12pm
K, maybe I'll stop bitching about all the browser problems and be glad that we're better off now then 10+ years ago :)
SilverWings
August 18, 2009 at 8:40pm
That sure brought back lot's of memorys. Most of them good, all of them interesting. Some now lost to old age as the mist of time slowly fade's into a dense comforting fog.
Netscape for my first graphical bowser. I was on Prodgy in the begining.
Now I use IE8 and Flock.
The Relic
August 18, 2009 at 8:25pm
Heh...the first true web browser I used was Netscape back in 1997 with Win 3.1 (before that, I used the Greater Columbus Freenet, so I was using Telix 3.2.1 to access it (starting with the Commodore 64, from a floppy disc, then DOS with my giant 10MB hard drive ^_^). After Apple screwed Netscape up, I kept using Netscape 4.7 for a couple of years, until I got XP, then used IE for a little while, then I tried Firefox, and never felt the temptation to return...
winmaster
August 18, 2009 at 5:09pm
This is awsome. I can't believe that it still works! Hopefully it won't be too broken.
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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
yourfriendlane
August 19, 2009 at 11:44am
Yep, Lynx is still alive and well and incredibly useful at times: for example, if you want to write a script that grabs your Twitter feed, you could either bother with the Twitter API and parse the XML using another utility, or just have Lynx load the page and use grep to trim out the unimportant parts.
I also use Lynx a lot on my netbook, which is running Crunchbang, when I just want to look something up very quickly, especially on a slow connection (like when I tether it to my phone). If I don't need to see the pictures, Lynx can spit something out ten times as fast as Firefox could.
blackbelt_jones
August 19, 2009 at 7:44am
Love the article, but "you still use lynx today" doesn't begin to express how ALIVE AND KICKING this old warhorse is and remains... but this does: the latest Lynx version, v2.8.7, was released July 5, 2009 less than a month a half ago at this writing!
I'm not a person who always uses text browsers, but today I'm trying to fix a problem with the xserver in an ongoing slackware install, and I am stuck in the console for a while. I originally attempted to post this message with Lynx, but I hit the wrong key a few times and wound up back in Google's privacy policy! Since then, I've finished compiling elinks, a text browser that seems a little more geared toward people who are used to firefox and opera
blackbelt_jones
August 19, 2009 at 7:42am
Love the article, but "you still use lynx today" doesn't begin to express how ALIVE AND KICKING this old warhorse is and remains... but this does: the latest Lynx version, v2.8.7, was released July 5, 2009 less than a month a half ago at this writing!
I'm not a person who always uses text browsers, but today I'm trying to fix a problem with the xserver in an ongoing slackware install, and I am stuck in the console for a while. I originally attempted to post this message with Lynx, but I hit the wrong key a few times and wound up back in Google's privacy policy! Since then, I've finished compiling elinks, a text browser that seems a little more geared toward people who are used to firefox and opera
