The problem the web solved
The internet existed for about twenty years before most people had reason to use it. Finding information meant knowing which computer held it and which program, such as FTP or telnet, would retrieve it. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, proposed a system of linked documents that could be read across different computers. A colleague, Robert Cailliau, later joined the effort and helped to promote it inside and outside CERN.
The design had three parts that still define the web: a way of writing documents with links (HTML), a way of requesting them over the network (HTTP) and a way to name them (what became known as URLs). A program was needed to display documents and follow links. That program is what we now call a browser.
WorldWideWeb, 1990
Berners-Lee wrote the first browser on a NeXT computer in late 1990. He called it WorldWideWeb, and later it was renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the web itself. It was also an editor: users could change pages as well as read them, an idea that mostly faded from early browsers. The first web server ran on the same kind of computer, and the earliest website described the project itself. Because the NeXT was an expensive and unusual machine, few people could run this software.
To reach more users, CERN had Nicola Pellow, a student working there, write a simple line-mode browser in 1991. It displayed text only and ran on almost any terminal, which made it easy to try. In August 1991, Berners-Lee announced the project in Internet newsgroups, and a small number of sites began to use it.
Other early browsers
The idea was soon taken up elsewhere, and credit for the next steps is shared among several groups:
- Erwise, a graphical browser written by students at Helsinki University of Technology in 1992, was among the first with a graphical interface, though it saw little use.
- ViolaWWW, written by Pei-Yuan Wei at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992, ran under the X Window System and included early ideas about scripts and embedded content.
- Lynx, a text-based browser from the University of Kansas, arrived in 1992 and was popular among people using terminals. It remains in use for text-only browsing.
- Cello, for Windows, was released in 1993.
The web was still small. In the early 1990s, it was one of several competing ways to organize internet information, alongside Gopher, a menu-based system from the University of Minnesota. A disagreement over licensing fees for Gopher in 1993 is often said to have pushed developers toward the web.
CERN opens the door
In April 1993, CERN announced that the web technology would be free for anyone to use, with no fees. This decision is regarded as important to the web’s growth, because companies and universities could build on it without negotiating permission. Without that release, the web might have been one commercial product among many.
Mosaic and the graphical leap
The program that did most to bring the web to ordinary people was Mosaic, released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in 1993. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina led its development. It ran on Unix systems first and then, within the same year, on Windows and Macintosh computers. Its main advantages were ease of installation, a clean interface with buttons and links that could be followed with a computer mouse, and the ability to show images inside a page rather than in separate windows. For many people, Mosaic was the first time the internet seemed accessible without technical training.
The effect was quick: web traffic grew by large factors through 1993 and 1994, and journalists started to write about the new medium.
What the first browser was and wasn’t
Using the word first for a browser is reasonable only if you say what you mean. WorldWideWeb was the first browser in time and was written by the web’s inventor. Mosaic was the first to reach a wide audience. Neither was the first program to display linked text, since hypertext systems existed before the web, including linked-document demonstrations by Douglas Engelbart in the 1960s, and neither would look familiar to a modern user, who is used to tabs, search bars and secure connections.
Why browsers mattered
Web browsers turned a technical network into a medium that anyone could use, and they began a change in how information was published. A page written once could be read from many kinds of computers, which encouraged companies, schools and individuals to put material online. Browsers also became the main way people use the internet, and many applications that once ran as separate programs now run inside them. That shift, which began in a physics laboratory, shaped the next three decades of computing.