FAQs : What was the
first web browser?
im Berners-Lee who invented the World
Wide Web in 1989 and first deployed a working system
in 1990, did so by writing a web browser for the NeXTStep
operating system. The original "WorldWideWeb"
browser program had a graphical user interface and so
on and is definitely recognizable to most people as
a web browser. However, WorldWideWeb did not support
graphics embedded in pages when it was first released.
You can learn more about the original "WorldWideWeb"
browser from Tim Berners-Lee himself.
The first web browser to become truly popular and capture
the imagination of the public was NCSA Mosaic. Developed
by Marc Andreessen, Jamie Zawinski and others who later
went on to create the Netscape browser, NCSA Mosaic
was the first to be available for Microsoft Windows,
the Macintosh, and the Unix X Window System, which made
it possible to bring the web to the average user. The
first version appeared in March 1993. The "inline
images," such as the boutell.com logo at the top
of this page, that are an integral part of almost every
web page today were introduced by NCSA Mosaic 2.0, in
January of 1994. Mosaic 2.0 also introduced forms.
Netscape is the browser that introduced most all of
the remaining major features that define a web browser
as we know it. The first version of Netscape appeared
in October 1994 under the code name "Mozilla."
Netscape 1.0's early beta versions introduced the "progressive
rendering" of pages and images, meaning that the
page begins to appear and the text can be read even
before all of the text and/or images have been completely
downloaded. Version 1.1, in March 1995, introduced HTML
tables, which are now used in the vast majority of web
pages to provide page layout. Version 2.0, in October
1995, introduced frames, Java applets, and JavaScript.
Version 2.0 was the last version of Netscape to introduce
a major feature of the web as we know it today; later
versions improved reliability and stability and introduced
features that did not catch on as standards for all
browsers. In 1998, Netscape decided to release their
browser source code as open source software, and the
Mozilla project began.
Microsoft Internet Explorer is by far the most common
web browser in use as of this writing. Internet Explorer
1.0, released in August 1995, broke no important new
ground in a way that became part of a future standard.
Later versions of Internet Explorer quickly caught up;
Internet Explorer 3.0 was very close to Netscape 2.0's
feature set. In July 1996, Internet Explorer 3.0 beta
introduced the first useful implementation of cascading
style sheets, which allow better control of the exact
appearance of web pages. In April 1997, Internet Explorer
4.0 introduced the first quality implementation of the
Document Object Model (DOM), which allows Javascript
to modify the appearance and content of a web page after
it has been loaded.
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