Browsers

A chronological listing of some of the influential early web browsers that advanced the state of the art is provided below:

• WorldWideWeb. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXT computer, called WorldWideWeb, finishing the first version on Christmas day, 1990. He released the program to a number of people at CERN in March, 1991, introducing the web to the high energy physics community, and beginning its spread.

• libwww. Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-Francois Groff ported the WorldWideWeb application from the NeXT environment to the more common C language in 1991 and 1992, calling the new browser libwww. Groff later started the first web design company, InfoDesign.ch.

• Line-mode. Nicola Pellow, a math student interning at CERN, wrote a line-mode web browser that would work on any device, even a teletype. In 1991, Nicola and the team ported the browser to a range of computers, from Unix to Microsoft DOS, so that anyone could access the web, at that point consisting primarily of the CERN phone book.

• Erwise. After a visit from Robert Cailliau, a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology joined together to write a web browser as a master's project. Since the acronym for their department was called "OTH", they called the browser "erwise", as a joke on the word "otherwise". The final version was released in April, 1992, and included several advanced features, but wasn't developed further after the students graduated and went on to other jobs.

• ViolaWWW. Pei Wei, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, released the second browser for Unix, called ViolaWWW, in May, 1992. This browser was built on the powerful interpretive language called Viola that Wei had developed for Unix computers. ViolaWWW had a range of advanced features, including the ability to display graphics and download applets.

FIRST WIDELY USED WEB BROWSER:

• Mosaic. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from the NCSA released the first version of Mosaic for X-Windows on Unix computers in February, 1993. A version for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released a few months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support. Mosaic introduced support for sound, video clips, forms support, bookmarks, and history files, and quickly became the most popular non-commercial web browser. In August, 1994, NCSA assigned commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc., which subsequently licensed the technology to several other companies, including Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer. The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in January 1997.