1. EVOLUTION OF WEB
BROWSERS
By Jyothi N
4th sem MLISc
Dept of LIS
Bangalore
university

2. Introduction:
 The tool we use to browse our favourite
website has a long and rich history with battles
for market share and dominance.
 In order to surf the web, you need a web
browser, and today there are several different
ones.
 No matter which browser you choose to surf
the web with, the features you take for granted
today are the result of nearly two decades of
browser design.

3. Definition:
 “A web browser is a software application for
retrieving, presenting, and passing over
information resources on the World Wide Web. An
information resource is identified by a Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web
page, image, video, or other piece of content”.
Or
 It is a software application to accesses information
provided by Web servers.
 Brings information resources to the user.
 Retrieve, present, and traverse information
resources on the World Wide Web.

4. Current Web browsers:
 Internet Explorer for Mac
 Internet Explorer for windows
 Lynx
 Mosaic
 Mozilla
 Mozilla Firefox
 Netscape
 Omni Web
 Safari
 Opera
 Google chrome

5. WorldWideWeb (1990)
 World‟s first web browser, coded by Tim Berners-Lee,
who is the inventor of web.
 The groundwork for WorldWideWeb began in the late
1980s. In 1990, it was the only way to see the web. It
was officially introduced in 1991.
 It was the first graphical web browser and
WYSIWYG HTML editor. WorldWideWeb could
display basic style sheets and navigation menu
contained "back," "next," and "previous" buttons, but
the browser also served as an editor. It was renamed
to Nexus avoid the confusion between the www
system.
 The source code was released into the public domain

6. Mosaic (1992)
 Mosaic was a major improvement in web clients
that made web browsing more friendly with
features like icons, bookmarks and more
attractive interface.
• By 1994, Mosaic had a user
base of several million users
worldwide. It was also a client for
earlier protocols such
as FTP, Usenet, and Gopher.

7. Erwise (1992)
 world's first graphical point-and-click browser was
Erwise. Developed by four Finnish students at the
Helsinki University of Technology, Erwise was
designed for UNIX computers running the X
Windows System.
 Advanced for its time, Erwise had the ability to
search for words on web pages. If it didn't find the
word it was looking for, it would scour the
internet, up to 12 pages at a time, to try to find it.
 Erwise could also load multiple pages at the
same time, but despite all the innovation and
promise, it was never commercialized, the result
of a "horrible recession" in Finland at the time.

8. ViolaWWW (1992)
 One of the earliest browsers, ViolaWWW was
launched in May 1992. It was written by Pei-Yuan
Wei, a University of California student, and like
Erwise, was built for UNIX and the X Windowing
System.
 This gave the browser a limited audience.
 Notable features include the ability to use multi font
text, functioning within a single windows operation
and the ability to clone a copy of a document in
other windows, inclusion of a History
window, "Home", "Back", and "Forward"
buttons, online help buttons, and even bookmarks.

9. MidasWWW (1992)
 Another X browser, MidasWWW was
released in November of 1992. It was
developed by Tony Johnson at SLAC, who
named it Midas for 'Motif Interactive Data
Analysis Shell.„
 One of the few innovations of
MidasWWW was that hyperlinks
changed color after you clicked on
them. It was also the first browser to

10. Lynx (1992)
 Although Erwise had already broken ground with a
graphical interface, Lynx, also released in 1992, was
a text-only browser originally developed by the
University of Kansas to distribute campus
information. It would later find an audience with the
visually impaired because of its text-to-speech
interface.
 In 1993, a student named Lou Montulli added an
Internet interface to the application and released it
as Lynx 2.0. This became popular for character
mode terminals that didn't rely on graphics, although
Lynx does possess the ability to launch external

11. Netscape (1994)
 Marc Andeerssen, the leader of Mosaic team at
NCSA, soon started his own company named
Netscape.
 Netscape released Netscape Navigator in 1994.
 First commercial web browser.
 Became the most used web browser of its time
and reached 90% of all web use at its peak.
 By 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This
was partly due to the increased usage of
Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser
software and other web browsers

12. Internet Explorer (1995)
 Microsoft initiated the web browsers by launching
Internet Explorer in 1995 (influenced by Mosaic).
 Internet Explorer was included with Windows that
created tough competition for Mosaic. It effectively
started off the first browser war for the market
dominance.
 It has been the most widely used web browser
since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage
share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and IE6.
 Latest official release - Internet Explorer 8
(IE8) in March of 2009.
 Next major release - Internet Explorer 9,
is currently in development.

13. Opera (1996)
 After working with Telenor, Opera released its
own web browser in 1996. It was Opera
version 2.0. Opera never achieved widespread
use as a desktop web browser.

14. Apple Safari (2003)
 Apple publically launched web browser for
their operating system, Mac OS X, on June 2003
named Safari.
 A version of Safari for the Microsoft Windows
operating system, first released on June
11, 2007, supports windows XP, Windows Vista, and
Windows 7. The latest stable release of the browser
is 5.0, which is available as a free download for both
Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.
 As of 2010, Safari is the fourth most
widely used browser, following Google

15. Mozilla Firefox (2004)
 Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross started an
experimental project (Firefox) as a branch of
Mozilla project.
 Firefox1.0 was released in the end of 2004.
 Firefox project has undergone several name
changes. Initially it was named Phoenix
but later it was renamed due to
trademark issues with Phoenix
Technologies.

16. Google Chrome (2008)
 Google Chrome‟s first Beta version was
released on 2 September 2008 for
Microsoft Windows.
 Google Chrome got famous because of its light
and simple looks.
 It made significant gains in market share.
 It overtook Firefox for 2nd place in 2011.

17. Browsers usage as on April
2012