History of the web browser
The method of accessing a particular page or content is achieved by entering its address, known as a Uniform Resource Identifier or URI.
A web browser can also be defined as an application software or program designed to enable users to access, retrieve and view documents and other resources on the Internet.
[2] Many others were soon developed, with Marc Andreessen's 1993 Mosaic (later Netscape),[3] being particularly easy to use and install, and often credited with sparking the internet boom of the 1990s.
In 1989, Larson created both HyperBBS[16][17] and HyperLan[18] which both allow multiple users to create/edit both topics and jumps for information and knowledge annealing which, in concept, the columnist John C. Dvorak says pre-dated Wiki by many years.
[citation needed] From 1987[dubious – discuss][19][20] on, Neil Larson also created TransText (hypertext word processor) and many utilities for rapidly building large scale knowledge systems.
[22] In 1989, he declined joining the Mosaic browser team with his preference for knowledge/wisdom creation over distributing information ... a problem he says is still not solved by today's internet.
Peter Scott and Earle Fogel expanded the earlier HyperRez (1988) concept in creating HyTelnet in 1990 which added jumps to telnet sites ... and which offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogs of over 5000 libraries around the world.
In April 1990, a draft patent application for a mass market consumer device for browsing pages via links "PageLink" was proposed by Craig Cockburn at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) whilst working in their Networking and Communications division in Reading, England.
The patent was canned by Digital as too futuristic and, being largely hardware based, had obstacles to market that purely software driven approaches lacked.
[34] Erwise was the first browser with a graphical user interface, developed as a student project at Helsinki University of Technology and released in April 1992, but discontinued in 1994.
[35] Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School started to develop Cello in 1992.
[7] Prior browsers would display an icon that, when clicked, would download and open the graphic file in a helper application.
Mosaic and browsers derived from it had a user option to automatically display images inline or to show an icon for opening in external programs.
Marc Andreessen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quit to form a company that would later be known as Netscape Communications Corporation.
"[36][37][38] Microsoft, which had thus far not marketed a browser, finally entered the fray with its Internet Explorer product (version 1.0 was released 16 August 1995), purchased from Spyglass, Inc.
[39] Although Microsoft has since faced antitrust litigation on these charges, the browser wars effectively ended once it was clear that Netscape's declining market share trend was irreversible.
This helped the browser maintain its technical edge over Internet Explorer, but did not slow Netscape's declining market share.
OmniWeb and Google Chrome, like Safari, use the WebKit rendering engine (forked from KHTML), which is packaged by Apple as a framework for use by third-party applications.
It was a popular choice in handheld devices, particularly mobile phones, but remains a niche player in the PC Web browser market.
