[12] By 1997, interest in libwww declined, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which took over from CERN, reduced its commitment to the project.

[13] Later, the purpose of libwww was redefined to be "a testbed for protocol experiments";[6] in that role it was maintained for the benefit of the W3C's web standards-promoting browser Amaya.

[9][15] In 1991 and 1992, Tim Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-François Groff rewrote various components of the original WorldWideWeb browser for the NeXTstep operating system in portable C code, in order to demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web.

[12] From February 1994 to July 1999 (versions 2.17 to 5.2.8), Henrik Frystyk Nielsen was responsible for libwww, first as a graduate student at CERN and later at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Pluggable modules provided with libwww add support for HTTP/1.1 with caching, pipelining, POST, Digest Authentication, and deflate.

The W3C created the Arena web browser as a testbed and testing tool for HTML3, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and libwww, among other technologies.