The Evolution History Further Down of Web Browsers

Moving further ahead of the year 1992, the web browsers saw progressive changes that made web browsing much more interesting and entertaining. With each passing year the development were noteworthy in the development of web browsers. Here are some of them.

MidasWWW – Released first in 1992

MidasWWW released in November 1992 and developed by Tony Johnson was called Midas. Midas stood for Motif Interactive Data Analysis Shell. This browser was popular among physicists but Johnson didn’t took interest in development of MidasWWW. But one of his colleague translated it to run on VAX computers, thus making it one of the few number of dedicated browsers to be used for VAXes.

Hyperlinks changed color once you click on them, this was one of the innovation of MidasWWW. Also this browser used plug-ins for the first time.

Lynx – Released first in 1992

Lynx was text only browser released in 1992. It was originally developed with the intention to distribute campus information by University of Kansas. With feature text-to-speech interface added to the browser, it was used by visually impaired in later stage.

In 1993, Lou Montulli a student had Internet interface added to the application to release as Lynx 2.0. The browser became popular with terminals having character mode that did not depend on graphics; though Lynx had an ability to handle images and videos through external applications.

Mosaic 1.0 – Released first in 1993

Erwise may be treated as first browser with graphical point and click, but Mosaic in the history is the first graphical browser to push world wide web into mainstream.

Mosaic was developed at National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). Mosaic was used on Unix computers with X-Windows. Initially the browser became popular through newsgroup. One of the developers would monitor and provide support as and when required.

At that time when Mosaic 1.0 was released there were no HTML 2.0 specification available so the browser was lacked many capabilities.

Development work of second version of Mosaic was started in January 1994 before a final version was released in October 1995.The first major browser to support HTML forms was Mosaic2.x. The BGSound element of Internet Explorer was supported but as compared to other browsers it was found to be very slow. Though another version of Mosaic was released but that was for only Mac platform.

Arena – Released first in 1993

Arena browser was developed by Dave Raggett in 1993, a year later after he started developing experimental web servers and browsers. This browser was developed for HTML specification. As per Raggett Arena was the first browser that supported background images, text flow around images, tables and mathematical expressions.

Cello – Released first in 1994

The browser Cello was developed for multi-purpose. It brought support for WorldWideWeb, FTP, Gopher and Usenet News retrieval. Thomas R. Bruce the developer of Cello found that most lawyers were having Microsoft Windows but most of the browsers were Unix or DOS based. Cello is treated as the first browser for Windows.