The History of Web Browsers
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Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in distance-learning education, front-end development, and web accessibility. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.
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53 Comments
D Bnonn Tennant
September 30th, 2009
A nice roundup, but I’m confused—is it Mosaic or Mosiac?
Karega
September 30th, 2009
I always felt that I.E. held a decisive advantage in terms of user-experience over all other browsers. The line has become blurred since the release of FF 1.0 and the field is leveling. I believe that I.E. lack of standards and w3c proposal adoption will be a strong blow against penetration of it’s next-generation browsers.
Yoyo
September 30th, 2009
most stupid article ever.
Rahul - Web Guru
September 30th, 2009
Nice list of web browser evolution.
cypherbox
September 30th, 2009
It’s so nice to know the history of the browsers. This is very informative post. Thanks!
Erik mit k
October 1st, 2009
Really cool!
Bt shouldn’t the browser in 1993 be called “Mosaic” and NOT “Mosiac”! :)
Armin
October 1st, 2009
Nice work, but actually it was “Mosaic” and not “Mosiac”…
ajay
October 1st, 2009
Thanks for share with us.
Pedro
October 1st, 2009
It’s Mosaic, not Mosiac.
Ray Pettersson
October 1st, 2009
I will definitely use this to teach my clients a little bit about web history and convince them to stop using Internet Explorer! By the way, I think you misspell “Mosaic”. Great article! Thanks a lot!
Jan
October 1st, 2009
eeeh, Mosiac??? Mosaic would be right ;)
xos
October 1st, 2009
The best is Firefox :D
Jacob Gube
October 1st, 2009
Hello everyone. Thanks for catching that glaring error. I had 1 out of the 3 “Mosaic” instances correct though! I’ve since corrected the graphic.
Thank you for noting the mistake to make the graphic more accurate, and I apologize for the oversight.
Jeff.K
October 1st, 2009
This has been done already much better than this; what a horrible overview and you miss some other browsers in between and other significant events. But to be expected of an internet nuub! You definitly weren’t around long on teh internets lol And one giant graphic? come on this is a WEB page you failed at any semantic value this should have by being broken down to, what, oh, a WEB PAGE and not a giant useless jpg
Angela
October 1st, 2009
Great Article, Firefox rocks I see my sis using IE and I cringe now lol
Waheed Akhtar
October 1st, 2009
Very nicely prepared and explained.
Thanks for sharing Jacob.
Sean Hurley
October 1st, 2009
Really cool break down! Do you have anything comparing the major browsers? Google, Bing, and Yahoo? Difference in design , functionality, etc?
Jim Summer
October 1st, 2009
Fun fact – dating back over a decade to the present… type about:mozilla in a mozilla based browser :~) – Would have been nice to see the evolution of Firefox from Phoenix thru Firebird and eventually, Firefox.
Thanks!
Jim – @seo_web_design on twitter
Dan
October 1st, 2009
I appreciated this post very much, even with the spelling error. All of us know what you meant. Anyway, nice writing! I love computer history, so it was fun to walk down memory lane.
Paiman Roointan
October 1st, 2009
Good start, but seems the writer was tired at the end!
where are IE8? FF2 and 3? FF download record? safari on windows? new opera 10 with new features? and many other things?
john
October 1st, 2009
Where’s Lynx? That’s the first browser I ever used. It was out before Mosaic was available. Circa ‘92. This was/is a text-based browser. In ‘92 most of the Web was text-based.
Jay Carlson
October 1st, 2009
um, one more slight information mix-up: you have given credit to Tim Berners-Lee as the inventor of the internet, when it was clearly invented by Al Gore.
Morgan Cheng
October 1st, 2009
Nice work.
The war continues with Google Chrome Frame which is a infiltration into Microsoft IE’s domain.
Brad C
October 1st, 2009
Nicely done. Using a graphical approach was more fun than just posting screenshots with descriptions.
Roy
October 1st, 2009
I’m assuming by “top action bar” you’re talking about the address bar. The row of buttons (the “toolbar”) already existed in many apps, and was graphically codified and promoted by Microsoft in the first GUI coding guidelines for Windows 3 (early 1990). I still have my notebook from Microsoft University where we wrote a Tic-Tac-Toe app where fully 2/3rds of the code was toolbar code!
In contrast, X-Windows Unix apps liked big slab-like buttons, also usually arrayed along the top, or they would have vertical text toolbars, as you show in TB-L’s first browser (written on a NeXTcube)
Jacob Gube
October 1st, 2009
@Sean Hurley: Wow, you just inspired me on a potential topic, thanks for that! (If i ever get around to making something like that – I’ll place a credit to your comment here).
@Jim Summer: Yet another great idea for this format. That can be tricky to do but worth the effort (I’d have to scour the internet for screen grabs of beta releases of FF).
@Dan: Thanks Dan – what I would hate to have happen is that everything gets glossed over because of a spelling mistake. I acknowledge the fault, and I corrected it as soon as I could.
@Paiman Roointan: All milestones that could’ve been included here.
@john: I was anticipating someone would leave that comment about Lynx. I chose to focus on graphical web browsers, but you’re right that Lynx is a pioneering web browser. Originally, the graphic had a note about how it was on “graphical browsers”, but I chose to edit that bit out for superficial reasons in the final version (regretting it now).
@Jay Carlson: Haha! :) And because I’m a jerk, I’d like to point out here that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (or “the web”), not the internet. Internet protocols that we use today already existed or were being developed when he proposed the world wide web ideas, he just brought them all together to construct an internet-connected information medium (world wide web). However, I do understand that the world wide web and “the internet” has become synonymous and interchangeable terms in our lexicon.
Zaki Usman
October 1st, 2009
Excellent wrap up. Question is what will happen in 2010?
Derek
October 1st, 2009
Safari 4 FTW. I like the way it interacts natively with OSX. Firefox feels cumbersome in comparison.
..but heck, I hate Google and I’d consider using Chrome before I even touch IE again.
Adam
October 1st, 2009
That was pretty fun. I would like to see some real numbers on who is where statistically. If you look close at the stats you find online the sites have the fine print (from users that visited this site) and in most cases it is us techy nerds visiting the site and not the ie users.
rjb
October 1st, 2009
A minor note of correction: Andreessen formed Mosaic Communications Corporation (mcom.com) releasing “Mosaic Netscape”. The company changed its name later to avoid TM issues.
Jacob Gube
October 1st, 2009
@Roy: Toolbar is a better (and more accurate) term for it, thanks for the information.
@Brad C: Partly inspired by your infocomics – though I can’t draw (like you can)! I feel it gives me a break and I have a bit more liberty in terms of layout.
I must confess though that I got lazy with the
longdescalternative for screen reader users – I’m going to get that up soon.@Derek: Any particular reason for the Google hate? I currently use Google Chrome when I’m off-duty since I think it handles RIA’s and websites that use Ajax heavily (i.e. Digg) much better than Firefox’s most recent release. I can’t say I’m much of a Safari fan, though I’d use it over IE (7 and below).
Martín Aberastegue
October 1st, 2009
Hi Jacob, great list but try to reflect the truth the next time about where the inspiration came from :P. You say IE7 took some features from FF like tabbed browsing and antiphishing… yes, the same FF adopted from Opera…You missed IE8!
Chris 'Xenon' Hanson
October 1st, 2009
Where is Chrome?
How about a mention of Konqueror and KHTML, which were the real genesis behind WebKit in Apple’s Safari?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
You didn’t think Apple invented that from scratch, did you?
taufiqahmed
October 1st, 2009
not much elaborated, a quick rushed out review perhaps. I should have been share the article.
btw, IE7 tab feature adopted from FF?? Google Chrome is lightweight?
Chris
October 2nd, 2009
And whats for the actual browser war and browser share? In some areas Firefox 3.x is already the leading browser. And what about IE8? The basics of your overview are nice, but it lacks at lot of details essential for “the browser story”.
Propagganda
October 2nd, 2009
Excelent recopilation. Thanks
Shitic
October 2nd, 2009
and my browser history:
IE6 > IE7 > IE8 > FF 3.5 > G.Chrome / FF 3.5 > G.Chrome / Opera Unite > G.Chrome
I’m using the google’s chrome now.
rob
October 2nd, 2009
cool, I had no idea opera has been around that long, I just thought they released new versions a lot.
Leave a Comment
October 2nd, 2009
jeff K hit this one on the head, why are you guys supporting this crap? this isn’t creative or original and not ground breaking, this is god awful and stop inspiring this crap
Diego
October 3rd, 2009
I’m currently on Chrome too. Specially at home. At work, I do deal with a lot of unfortunate IE6-only stuff (knowledge mangement, in RoboHelp specially); must say it is a mess, but lately we look at the breaking of IE6 more like a team building activity hahaha. Also use FF 3.x at work and at home. Not sure why, Chrome is way more efficient to me.
Jim
October 3rd, 2009
Why don’t some of you know-it-all douchebags write your own “perfect” article.
HO
October 5th, 2009
not much elaborated, a quick rushed out review perhaps. I should have been share the article.
btw, IE7 tab feature adopted from FF?? Google Chrome is lightweight?
Linux And Friends
October 6th, 2009
Wow that is one huge image. Nevertheless tastefully done.
You have not covered some of the more prominent albeit lesser known web browsers such as Konqueror, Galeon, Dillo, Text only browsers like Links and so on.
Nice compilation though.
Yang
October 6th, 2009
Google chrome I just like it!
glyconutrients
October 6th, 2009
Missing two VERY important ones.
Lynx, which was already mentioned by another reader, and AOL, which was HUGE in mid-late 90’s.
I also think it is important to indicate release of IE and NN 4.0 as this there were MAJOR changes in stylesheets, DHTML, etc.
Jason
October 6th, 2009
@HO Firefox tabs where there well before Chrome was a gleam in Google’s eye.
Web 2.0
October 22nd, 2009
Well I didn’t know that Mozilla was formed in 1998… my browser is FireFox.. great work, thanks!
P Smith
November 17th, 2009
Calling this a “history” is like calling a couple of index cards an encyclopedia. There are so many more facets of browser history such as Mosaic being open source and borrowed/stolen for Netscape and Microshaft’s Spyglass (later Infernal Exploder), the plethora of niche browsers (many based on Active-X) in the late 1990s, and the failed history of WAP.
zoomzoom
November 29th, 2009
Jeff.K: seems like you are some immature kid. seen your “website” and you dont have any right to criticize this awesome article.
alexlex
January 6th, 2010
Nice work, my browser is FireFox.. great work, thanks!
Michelle
February 5th, 2010
What about Lynx? I used that all the time in the early 90’s. I had no graphic capability until 1998 or so, and Lynx was an ideal text-based browser for my situation.
Arb
May 20th, 2010
History of Web browsers is not limited to the creation of websites, as well as a compilation of data and other data.
gouri pawar
July 28th, 2010
hi….
I am not satisfied with these evolution , I need more information….
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