Browser Breakdown

Early Browsers

The history of web browsers began in the early 1990s with the creation of the World Wide Web. The first browsers were simple tools for accessing text-based web pages.

Tim Berners-Lee is credited for developing that first ever browser known as the World Wide Web or WWW, and it was renamed Nexus in later years. In the beginning of it's creation, there wasn't a search engine associated with the browser. The search capabilities were strictly relying on keywords. By 1993, Mosaic was created by the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications and it quickly gained popularity for being the first graphical browser to demonstrate images on the web. Shortly after, Netscape became famous for being the first to go public, and by 1995 Microsoft released the Internet Explorer, which later became known as Microsoft Edge.

Following this trend, we later gained access to browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. With the advancements of new browsers came new features and rendering was able to be completed at high speeds. As technology continued to evolve, each company tried to outdo the others, and browser war ensued.

Key Milestones

• 1990: WorldWideWeb (later Nexus), developed by Tim Berners-Lee, was the first web browser.
• 1993: Mosaic, created by NCSA, introduced graphical browsing, popularizing the web.
• 1994: Netscape Navigator emerged as a leading browser.
• 1995: Microsoft released the Internet Explorer.