The first web browser

The first ever web browser was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and was called WorldWideWeb. It was completed in December, 1990 and introduced to a number of people at CERN in March, 1991. WorldWideWeb had a graphical user interface but it did not support graphics embedded in pages.

Other web browser soon followed:

  • libwww
  • Line-mode
  • Erwise
  • ViolaWWW
  • Midas
  • Samba

But the first web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web was Mosaic, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After the initial beta versions, Mosaic v. 1.0 was released on November 11, 1993.

Mosaic broke away from the small pack of existing browsers by including features (such as icons, bookmarks, a clean and intuitive user interface, pictures displayed together with text instead than in a separate window) that made the software easy to use and appealing to "non-geeks."

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