‘A map to the buried treasures of the Information Age’
IDEA No 22
WEB BROWSER
At the end of 1992 there were 50 websites in the world. Five years later there were a million. The reason for this rapid growth was the web browser.
The Mosaic browser, the world’s first cross-platform point-and-click browser.
When Tim Berners-Lee created the first webpage, he also created the first web browser (see The Project). He called it WorldWideWeb, later renaming it the Nexus browser. The crucial point about his browser was that it was a browsereditor. Not only did it allow visitors from the local server to view a page, but also it allowed them to edit it. This was a key part of Berners-Lee’s vision. He envisaged the Web as a multi-author environment.
The Nexus browser ran only on the NeXTstep operating system. A more widely accessible version was needed fast. As a short-term measure, Berners-Lee asked Nicola Pellow, a student intern at CERN, to write a read-only browser. It was called Line Mode. Browsers have been passive ever since.
In 1992, inspired by Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard, Pei-Yuan Wei released ViolaWWW. It was the first graphical browser. Viola’s functionality was ahead of the game, but it only worked on Unix. In 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the Mosaic browser, the world’s first cross-platform point-and-click browser. Described by the New York Times as ‘a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age … so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch’, Mosaic changed everything. The Web was no longer the exclusive domain of academics. Developed at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), it quickly became the Web’s most popular browser.
In 1994, Marc Andreessen left NCSA and formed Netscape Communications with Jim Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics. They launched Netscape Navigator the same year with the campaign, ‘The Web is for everyone’. The company went public in November 1995, the shares more than doubling in value on the first day of trading. It was a sign of things to come.
Microsoft reacted decisively. It licensed the Mosaic code and released Internet Explorer, but it was a long way behind – Netscape had 86 per cent of the market. Microsoft decided to play tough. It shipped Internet Explorer as part of Windows 95. Netscape could not compete. With nothing to lose, in 1998 it released the code under an open-source licence. Mozilla 1.0 was released in 2002 but it failed to catch on. In 2004, a slimmer version was released – Mozilla Firefox – which quickly captured a quarter of the browser market.
Twenty years on, Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome have joined the browser wars. What is remarkable is how similar today’s browsers are to Mosaic, the Web’s first killer app.■
Bill Gates testifying in the 1998 United States versus Microsoft Corporation anti-trust case, where Microsoft was accused of engaging in monopolistic practices.