WorldWideWeb was the world's first Web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor and was introduced on February 26, 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee and ran on the NeXTSTEP platform. It was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web.

WorldWideWeb (WWW) was the first program which used not only the common File Transfer Protocol but also the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, invented by Berners-Lee in 1989. At the time it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.

The source code was released into the public domain in 1993, thus making it free software.

A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb during the second half of 1990 while working for CERN. The first successful build was completed on Christmas Day, 1990, and successive builds circulated among Berners-Lee's colleagues at CERN before being released to the public (by way of Internet newsgroups) in August 1991. By this time, several others, including Bernd Pollermann, Robert Cailliau, Jean-Fran?ois Groff, and graduate student Nicola Pellow (who wrote the line-mode browser), were involved in the project.

Berners-Lee and Groff later adapted many of WorldWideWeb's components into a C programming language version, creating the libwww API.

A number of early browsers appeared, notably ViolaWWW. They were all eclipsed by Mosaic in terms of popularity, which by 1993, had replaced the WorldWideWeb program. Those involved in its creation had moved on to other tasks, such as defining standards and guidelines for the further development of the World Wide Web—e.g. HTML, various communication protocols, and so on.

On April 30, 1993, the CERN directorate released the source code of WorldWideWeb into the public domain, making it free software. Several versions of the software are still available to download from evolt.org's browser archive. Berners-Lee initially considered releasing it under the GNU General Public License, but eventually opted for public domain to maximise corporate support.

Erwise

Erwise was a popular web browser in the early days of the World Wide Web. At the time of its release in April 1992, one month prior to ViolaWWW, it was the world's first web browser with a graphical user interface for non-NeXT computers. The browser was written for Unix computers running X Window and used the W3 common access library. Erwise was a combined master's project of four Finnish students at the Helsinki University of Technology; Kim Nyberg, Teemu Rantanen, Kati Suominen and Kari Syd?nmaanlakka. The group decided to create a web browser at the suggestion of Robert Cailliau, who was visiting the university. They were supervised by Ari Lemmke.

The development of Erwise froze after the students graduated and went on to other projects. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, travelled to Finland to encourage the group to continue with the project. However, none of the project members could afford to continue with the project without proper funding. Berners-Lee couldn't continue their work either, as all the code was written in Finnish.

The name Erwise originates from otherwise and the name of the project group, OHT.

ViolaWWW

ViolaWWW, first developed in the early 1990s, was the first popular web browser (though to a limited audience) which until Mosaic, was the most frequently used for access to the World Wide Web.

Gillies and Cailliau in How the Web was Born, offer an extensive history of the development of Viola. Viola was the invention of Pei-Yuan Wei, who at the time was a student at the University of California, Berkeley.

HyperCard

His interest in graphically based software began with HyperCard which he first discovered in 1989. Gillies and Cailliau quote Pei-Yuan Wei on this discovery: "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing, it was just not very global and it only worked on Mac...and I didn't even have a Mac" (p.213). Only having access to X terminals, he (in 1990) created the first version of Viola for them: "I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them in X-windows[sic]" (p.213).

Viola 0.8

He released Viola 0.8 in 1991, and then after graduating began to develop Viola even further while working with "Berkeley's Experimental Computing Facility" as well as at a few start ups (p.213).

The World Wide Web

At this time, as Gillies and Cailliau indicate, Pei Wei's major goal was to create a version of Viola for the Internet: what Pei Wei wanted to do next was run it over the Internet. X-Window was a Unix-based system so it had TCP/IP built in and the Internet was a logical step. The question was how to transport his Viola pages across the Internet. He was on the verge of an independent invention of networked hypertext. 'And that's when I read Tim's e-mail about the World Wide Web' he explains 'The URL was very, very clever, it was perfectly what I needed. He dropped Tim a line saying that he was thinking of writing a browser for X. 'Sounds like a good idea,' said Tim in a reply posted to www-talk on 9 December. Four Days later, Pei Wei told www-talk that he had made a browser" (p.214).

ViolaWWW

Created in 1992, it was the first browser to use authoring technology such as embedded scriptable objects, stylesheets, and tables. According to Gillies and Cailliau "Viola was to become the first X-browser to make any impact, but even his early versions went down well at CERN...As this ViolaWWW developed, it was to set the standard for everything to follow it..." (p.214). Ed Kroll also highlighted it in his popular 1992 text, Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog.

Graphics

As ViolaWWW developed, it began to look more like HyperCard: It had a bookmark facility so that you could keep track of your favourite pages. It had buttons for going backwards and forwards and a history feature to keep track of the places you had been. As time went on, it acquired tables and graphics and by May 1993 it could even run programs." (p.214).

Specifics

It was based on the Viola toolkit, which is a tool for the development and support of visual interactive media applications, with a multimedia web browser being a possible application. Viola ran under the X Window System and could be used to build complex hypermedia applications that were beyond HTML 3.0 (the latest version of HTML at that time).

Ahead of its time

Viola was interesting because it was the first web browser to have the following features: client-side document insertion, predating frames which are used commonly today.

Line-Mode Browser

The first such browser was WWW - The Libwww Line Mode Browser, based on and shipped with the libwww library.

WWW - The Libwww Line Mode Browser was written before February 11, 1991 by Nicola Pellow, an intern working at CERN. The first stable version, 1.1 was released in January1992. Tim Berners-Lee had already written the first browser, WorldWideWeb, but that program only worked on NeXT computers, which were in limited use. So, Berners-Lee and his team recruited Pellow to write a browser so basic that it could run on any computer in existence at that time. The name "line-mode browser" is derived from that fact that, in order to ensure compatibility with the earliest computer terminals, such as Teletype machines, the program only displayed text one line at a time.

Mosaic

Mosaic was the first popular World Wide Web browser and Gopher client. It was reliable and easy to install, which opened the Web up to the general public. Mosaic was the first browser to actually implement images embedded in the text, rather than displayed in a separate window.

Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) beginning in late 1992. NCSA released the browser in 1993, and officially discontinued development and support on January 7, 1997. However, it can still be downloaded from NCSA. Plaque commemorating the creation of Mosaic web browser by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen, new NCSA building, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Web browsers were the killer applications of the 1990s because they were the first programs to provide a multimedia graphical user interface to the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services (formerly limited to applications such as FTP, Usenet and Gopher). This was also a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions.

Other browsers existed during this period, notably Erwise, ViolaWWW, Midas, and Cello. These browsers, however, would not create the same impact as Mosaic upon public use of the Internet. In the October 1994 Issue of Wired, Gary Wolfe notes in the article, "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don't look now, but Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe are all suddenly obsolete - and Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface":“ When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing. If this sounds wrong, consider Mosaic. Mosaic is the celebrated graphical "browser" that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext "links" to other documents. By following the links - click, and the linked document appears - you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.

Netscape Navigator

Netscape Navigator, also known as Netscape, was a proprietary web browser that was popular during the 1990s. Once the flagship product of Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant browser in usage share, its user base had almost completely evaporated by 2002, partly due to the inclusion of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser with the Windows operating system, but also due to lack of significant innovation after the late 1990s. Netscape's demise was a central component of Microsoft's antitrust trial, where the court ruled that (among other things) bundling Internet Explorer with Windows was an illegal monopolistic business practice.

The Navigator browser was succeeded by the Netscape Communicator internet suite, followed by later releases Netscape 6, Netscape 7 and Netscape Browser 8.

However it was confirmed on 1 May 2007 the Netscape Navigator name would once again be re-generated in the next release of Netscape's browser, Netscape Navigator 9.

One of the central figures in the Netscape story is Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

After his graduation from Illinois in 1993, Andreessen moved to California to work at Enterprise Integration Technologies. Andreessen then met with Jim Clark, the recently-departed founder of Silicon Graphics. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California, with Andreessen appointed as a vice-president. The University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, so "Mosaic Communications Corporation" changed its name to Netscape Communications (thought up by sales representative Greg Sands) and its flagship web browser was the Netscape Navigator. Mosaic Netscape 0.9, a pre-1.0 version. Note the image of the Mozilla mascot, and the Mosaic logo in the top-right corner.

Beta versions of the web browser were freely downloadable in mid- to late-1994, and version 1.0 of the browser was released by the end of the year.

The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were completely identical to the commercial versions; the letter was there to remind people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support. Email support was initially free, and remained so for a year or two until the volume of support requests grew too high.

During development, the Netscape browser was known by the code name Mozilla, which became the name of a Godzilla-like cartoon dragon mascot used prominently on the company's web site. The Mozilla name was also used as the User-Agent in HTTP requests by the browser. Other web browsers claimed to be compatible with Netscape's extensions to HTML, and therefore used the same name in their User-Agent identifiers so that web servers would send them the same pages as were sent to Netscape browsers. A competitor's unauthorized use of a trademarked name could have been grounds for a lawsuit, but that possibility was left unexplored. Mozilla is now a generic name for matters related to the open source successor to Netscape Communicator.

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of proprietary graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995.

After the first release for Windows 95, additional versions of Internet Explorer were developed for other operating systems: Internet Explorer for Mac and Internet Explorer for UNIX (the latter for use through the X Window System on Solaris and HP-UX). Only the Windows version remains in active development; the Mac OS X version is no longer supported.

It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, peaking at nearly 90% market share with IE6 in the early 2000s—corresponding to over 900 million users worldwide by 2006.

Though released in 1995 as part of the initial OEM release of Windows 95, Internet Explorer was not included in the first retail, or shrink-wrap, release of Windows 95. The most recent release is version 7.0, which is available as a free update for Windows XP with Service Pack 2, and Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 or later, and is included with Windows Vista. Versions of Internet Explorer prior to 6.0 SP2 are also available as a separate download for versions of Windows prior to Windows XP. An embedded OEM version called Internet Explorer for Windows CE (IE CE) is also available for WinCE based platforms and is currently based on IE6. Another Windows CE/ Windows Mobile browser known as Internet Explorer Mobile is from a different codebase and should not be confused with desktop versions of the browser.

Internet Explorer began conceptually as one of the major components of the unreleased Windows 97, imagined as the successor to Windows 95. The project was started in the summer of 1994 by Thomas Reardon and subsequently led by Benjamin Slivka, leveraging source code from Spyglass, Inc. Mosaic, an early commercial web browser with formal ties to the pioneering NCSA Mosaic browser. In late 1994, Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic for a quarterly fee plus a percentage of Microsoft's non-Windows revenues for the software. Although bearing a name similar to NCSA Mosaic, which was the first widely used web browser, Spyglass Mosaic was relatively unknown in its day and used the NCSA Mosaic source code only sparingly.

Opera

The Opera Internet suite began in 1994 as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. In 1995, it branched out into an independent company named Opera Software ASA.

The Opera browser was, until version 2.0, called MultiTorg Opera and was not available to the public — although online documents show it at The Third International WWW Conference in 1995. It was known for its multiple document interface (MDI) and 'hotlist' (sidebar), which made browsing several pages at once much easier, as well as being the first browser to completely focus on adhering to the W3C standards.