History of the web browser

The history of the web browser dates back to late 1980s when a variety technologies laid the foundation for the first web browser, the WorldWideWeb, by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, which brought together a variety of existing and new software and hardware technologies. __TOC__

1980s to early 1990s

In 1984, expanding on ideas from futurist Ted Nelson, Neil Larson's commercial DOS Maxthink outline program added angle bracket hypertext jumps (adopted by later web browsers) to and from ASCII, batch, and other Maxthink files up to 32 levels deep. Fact|January 2008|date=February 2008 In 1986 he released his DOS Houdini network browser program that supported 2500 topics cross-connected with 7500 links in each file along with hypertext links among unlimited numbers of external ASCII, batch, and other Houdini files. Fact|January 2008|date=February 2008

In 1987, these capabilities were included in his then popular shareware DOS file browser programs HyperRez (memory resident) and PC Hypertext (which also added jumps to programs, editors, graphic files containing hot spots jumps, and cross-linked theraurus/glossary files). These programs introduced many to the browser concept and 20 years later, Google still lists 3,000,000 references to PC Hypertext. In 1989, he created both HyperBBS and HyperLan which both allow multiple users to create/edit both topics and jumps for information and knowledge annealing which, in concept, the columnist John C. Dvorak says pre-dated Wiki by many years. Fact|January 2008|date=February 2008

From 1987 on, he also created TransText (hypertext word processor) and many utilities for rapidly building large scale knowledge systems ... and in 1989 helped produce for one of the big eight accounting firms a comprehensive knowledge system of integrating all accounting laws/regulations into a CDROM containing 50,000 files with 200,000 hypertext jumps. Additionally, the Lynx (a very early web-based browser) development history notes their project origin was based on the browser concepts from Neil Larson and Maxthink. [ [http://people.cc.ku.edu/~grobe/early-lynx.html An Early History of Lynx] ] In 1989, he declined joining the MOSAIC browser team with his preference for knowledge/wisdom creation over distributing information ... a problem he says is still not solved by today's internet.

Another early browser, Silversmith, was created by John Bottoms in 1987. [ [http://www.gbcacm.org/website/html/pastmeetings99-00.shtml#Bottoms John Bottoms' short biography] ] The browser, based on SGML tags, used a tag set from the Electronic Document Project of the AAP with minor modifications and was sold to a number of early adopters. At the time SGML was used exclusively for the formatting of printed documents. The use of SGML for electronically displayed documents signaled a shift in electronic publishing and was met with considerable resistance. Silversmith included an integrated indexer, full text searches, hypertext links between images text and sound using SGML tags and a return stack for use with hypertext links. It included features that are still not available in today's browsers. These include capabilities such as the ability to restrict searches within document structures, searches on indexed documents using wild cards and the ability to search on tag attribute values and attribute names. [http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/exeter-SGMLFAQ.txt SGML-FAQ] [http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5157783.html US Patent]

Starting in 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel expanded the earlier HyperRez concept in creating Hytelnet which added jumps to telnet sites ... and which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogs of over 5000 libraries around the world. The strength of Hytelnet was speed and simplicity in link creation/execution at the expense of a centralized world wide source for adding, indexing, and modifying telnet links. Fact|January 2008|date=February 2008 This problem was solved by the invention of the web server.

Berners-Lee used.

A NeXTcube was used by Tim Berners-Lee (who pioneered the use of hypertext for sharing information) as the world's first Web server, and also an early Web browser, WorldWideWeb in 1990. Berners-Lee introduced it to colleagues at CERN in March 1991. Since then the development of Web browsers has been inseparably intertwined with the development of the Web itself.

In April 1990, a [http://www.siliconglen.com/pagelink/ draft patent application] for a mass market consumer device for browsing pages via links "PageLink" was proposed by Craig Cockburn at Digital Equipment Co Ltd (DEC) whilst working in their Networking and Communications division in Reading, England. This application for a keyboardless touch screen browser for consumers also makes reference to "navigating and searching text" and "bookmarks" was aimed at (quotes paraphrased) "replacing books", "storing a shopping list" "have an updated personalised newspaper updated round the clock", "dynamically updated maps for use in a car" and suggests such a device could have a "profound effect on the advertising industry". The patent was canned by Digital as too futuristic and, being largely hardware based, had obstacles to market that purely software driven approaches did not suffer from.

Early 1990s: WWW browsers

In 1992, Tony Johnson released the MidasWWW browser. Based on Motif/X, MidasWWW allowed viewing of PostScript files on the Web from Unix and VMS, and even handled compressed PostScript. [ [http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/history.shtml The Early World Wide Web at SLAC: Early Chronology and Documents ] ] Another early popular Web browser was ViolaWWW, which was modeled after HyperCard.

However, the explosion in popularity of the Web was triggered by NCSA Mosaic which was a graphical browser running originally on Unix and soon ported to the Amiga and VMS platforms, and later the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1.0 was released in September 1993, and was dubbed the killer application of the Internet. Marc Andreessen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quit to form a company that would later be known as Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape released its flagship Navigator product in October 1994, and it took off the next year.

IBM presented its own Web Explorer with OS/2 Warp in 1994.

Microsoft, which had thus far not marketed a browser (in fact even as late as 1995 Bill Gates dismissed personal use of the World Wide Web as a passing fad)Fact|date=September 2007, finally entered the fray with its Internet Explorer product, purchased from Spyglass, Inc. This began what is known as the "browser wars", the fight for the Web browser market between Microsoft and Netscape.

The wars put the Web in the hands of millions of ordinary PC users, but showed how commercialization of the Web could stymie standards efforts. Both Microsoft and Netscape liberally incorporated proprietary extensions to HTML in their products, and tried to gain an edge by product differentiation, leading to the acceptance of the Cascading Style Sheets proposed by Håkon Wium Lie over Netscape's JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS) by W3C.

Late 1990s: Microsoft vs Netscape

In 1996, Netscape's share of the browser market reached 86% (with Internet Explorer edging up 10%); but then Microsoft began integrating its browser with its operating system and bundling deals with OEMs, and within two years the balance had reversed. Although Microsoft has since faced antitrust litigation on these charges, the browser wars effectively ended once it was clear that Netscape's declining market share trend was irreversible. Prior to the release of Mac OS X, Internet Explorer for Mac and Netscape were also the primary browsers in use on the Macintosh platform.

Unable to continue commercially funding their product's development, Netscape responded by open sourcing its product, creating Mozilla. This helped the browser maintain its technical edge over Internet Explorer, but did not slow Netscape's declining market share. Netscape was purchased by America Online in late 1998. At first, the Mozilla project struggled to attract developers, but by 2002 it had evolved into a relatively stable and powerful internet suite. Mozilla 1.0 was released to mark this milestone. Also in 2002, a spin off project that would eventually become the popular Firefox was released.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would no longer be made available as a separate product but would be part of the evolution of its Windows platform, and that no more releases for the Macintosh would be made.

AOL announced that it will retire support and development of the web browser, Netscape, in February 2008, and encouraged users to use Mozilla Firefox or Flock. [ [http://www.searchviews.com/index.php/archives/2008/01/aol-to-pull-plug-on-netscape.php AOL to retire Netscape] ]

2000s

In the second half of 2004 Internet Explorer reached a peak market share of more than 92% [ [http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0&qpmr=15&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=M Market share for browsers, operating systems and search engines ] ] . Since then, its market share has been slowly but steadily declining and is less than 75% as of February 2008. In early 2005, Microsoft reversed its decision to release Internet Explorer as part of Windows, announcing that a standalone version of Internet Explorer was under development. Internet Explorer 7 was released for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista in October 2006. Internet Explorer 8 is under development and a beta version has been released. [ [http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx Internet Explorer 8 home page] ]

Apple's Safari, the default browser on Mac OS X from version 10.3 onwards, has grown to dominate browsing on Mac OS X. Browsers such as Firefox, Camino and Flock are also popular amongst Mac users.Fact|date=April 2008 In August 2007, Apple also ported Safari for use on the Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

Opera, an innovative, speedy browser was first released in 1996. It is a popular choice in handheld devices, particularly mobile phones, but remains a niche player in the PC Web browser market. It is also available on Nintendo's DS, DS Lite and Wii consoles. [ [http://www.opera.com/products/devices/nintendo/ Opera browser: Features ] ] The Opera Mini browser uses the Presto layout engine like all versions of Opera, but runs on most phones supporting Java Midlets.

The Lynx browser remains popular for Unix shell users and with vision impaired users due to its entirely text-based nature. There are also several text-mode browsers with advanced features, such as w3m, Links (which can operate both in text and graphical mode), and the Links forks such as ELinks.

See also

* History of the Internet
* Timeline of web browsers

References

External links

* [http://browsers.evolt.org evolt.org - Browser Archive]