[11][14] Originally begun by Dave Raggett in 1993, development continued at CERN and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and subsequently by Yggdrasil Computing.

Arena was used in testing the implementations for HTML version 3.0,[15] Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Portable Network Graphics (PNG),[3] and libwww.

Arena, which predated Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, featured a number of innovations used later in commercial products.

[8][20][21] Dave Raggett, realizing that there were not enough working hours left for him to succeed at what he felt was an immensely important task, continued writing his browser at home.

There he would sit at a large computer that occupied a fair portion of the dining room table, sharing its slightly sticky surface with paper, crayons, Lego bricks and bits of half-eaten cookies left by the children.

In 1993, Dave Raggett, then at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Bristol, England devoted his spare time to developing Arena on which he hoped to demonstrate new and future HTML specifications.

Using the Arena browser, Dave Raggett, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, Håkon Wium Lie and others demonstrated text flow around a figure with captions, resizable tables, image backgrounds, HTML math, and other features.

[29][30] In October 1995, Yves Lafon joined the team for a year to provide support for HTML form and style sheet development.

[14][16] Despite its time of development, Arena is in certain areas a relatively modern browser; because it functioned as a testbed,[36] it saw the implementation of new technologies long before they became mainstream, e.g. CSS.

[5] The W3C published 5 versions of the Arena beta-1 between 27 November 1995 and 8 February 1996 improving 16-bit operating system support[44] and reimplementing CSS (which was still a Working Draft).

[3][note 1] The W3C did not consider demonstration projects to be high priority, and thus, the Arena browser was entirely shut down in favor of outside Linux-community development.

[70][75][76] Originally, the Arena browser was built on top of Xlib as Raggett considered the programming manuals for Motif and other X libraries to be rather daunting.