Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Browser History

The story of the browser provides useful context for the way web sites are currently designed and developed. This brief and simplified timeline highlights a few of the significant events in the development of the major browsers that have led to the current web design environment.

Tip

If you are interested in the history of browsers and the Web, take a look at the thorough timeline and the old browser emulators at Deja Vu (http://www.dejavu.org).

1991 to 1993: The World Wide Web is born.

Tim Berners-Lee started his hypertext-based information management at the CERN physics research labs. Text-only pages could be viewed using a simple line-mode browser.

1993: NCSA Mosaic is released.

The Mosaic browser was created by Marc Andreessen, a student at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) . Although it was not the first browser to allow graphics to be placed on the page, it was certainly the most popular due to its cross-platform availability. The ability to add images to documents was one of the keys to the Web’s rapid rise in popularity. Mosaic also supported sound, video, bookmarks, and forms. All web pages at this time were displayed in black text on a gray background .

1994: Netscape 0.9 is released.

Marc Andreessen formed Mosaic Communications Corp. (which later became Netscape Communications) and released the Netscape 0.9 browser. The early browsers were not free (except to students and teachers). To offer a superior experience over such freely available ...