It was called the WorldWideWeb and invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, in Switzerland. And together with Robert Cailliau, they built the first working prototype in 1990 and 1991.
“For as much as Berners-Lee seems proud that the browser has come as far as it has, growing from an underground academic phenomenon to a vitally important tool in millions of peoples lives, he still believes browsers are too limiting in how they allow people to input and consume information.” Interactive Nature of Browser Colors Past and Future
Later it was renamed Nexus in order to avoid confusion between the program itslef and the abstract information of space, now called the World Wide Web (notice the spaces).
Next came a graphical browser (a browser that would display graphics) that became very popular, the NCSA Mosaic. This was developed by Marc Andreessen, Jamie Zawinski and others. Later they created the Netscape browser.
The NCSA Mosaic was the first to be available for both Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh, and for the Unix X Window System. It appeared in 1993.
In October, 1994, appeared Netscape under the code name, Mozilla. This browser pretty much introduced the balance of the remaining major features that are in a web browser today.
While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is the most predominantly used browser in the world today, they came late to the party. IE 1.0 was released in August of 1995.
To see the various time lines for the different browsers: Brian Wilson’s browser time-lines.
Notable browsers In order of release:
- List of web browsers
- WorldWideWeb, February 26, 1991
- Mosaic, April 22, 1993
- Netscape Navigator and Netscape Communicator, October 13, 1994
- Internet Explorer 1, August 16, 1995
- Opera, 1996
- Mozilla Navigator, June 5, 2002
- Safari, January 7, 2003
- Mozilla Firefox, November 9, 2004
- Google Chrome, September 2, 2008
