History of Web browser

CERN’s first web browser was created in 1990, but it was 1991 before it was available on the internet for other organization to use.

World Wide Web developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 at the same time as he wrote the first browser program that allowed user to access web pages throughout the world. He developed the HTTP 0.9 protocol, their browsers soon followed, including Erwise, ViolaWWW, MidasWWW and Cello.

When Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web browser, the computer he used was a NeXT computer designed by Steve Jobs.

By the end of 1992, several browsers had been created for UNIX computers by CERN and several other European and American universities, and there were about 30 Web serves in the entire world. The year 1992 also saw the released of Lynx, the first text-base browser - the others all utilize graphical user interfaced.

In 1993, Marc Andreessen, a student at the University of Illinois, led a team of students that wrote Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, as part of a project for the University’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Although Mosaic was not as sophisticated as its competitors, a lot of effort had gone into making it easy to install.

By end of 1993, the Mosaic browser was available for UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh computers and there were about 200 Web servers in the world. NCSA stopped development of the Mosaic browser in 1996.

These were replaced in later years by Netscape which dominated the browser market until Microsoft developed Internet Explorer. Today, the most popular web browsers to the internet are Mozilla Firefox, Safari by Apple, and Google Chrome.
History of Web browser