各种浏览器版本发布时间表：

 Macintosh IE 

以上材料作者：by Brian Wilson

Web History - Browsers

Summary: Dozens of different web browsers have been developed over the years.

The first widely used web browser was NCSA Mosaic. The Mosaic programming team then developed the first commercial web browser called Netscape Navigator, later renamed Communicator, then renamed back to just Netscape. The Netscape browser led in user share until Microsoft Internet Explorer took the lead in 1999 due to its advantage in being bundled with Windows operating systems. An open source version of Netscape was then developed called Mozilla, which was the internal name for the old Netscape browser, and released in 2002. Mozilla has since gained in market share, particularly on non-Windows platforms, due to its open source foundation.

A chronological listing of some influential early web browsers is provided below, each of which advanced the state of the art:

• WorldWideWeb. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXT computer, called WorldWideWeb, finishing the first version on Christmas day, 1990. He released the program to a number of people at CERN in March, 1991, introducing the web to the high energy physics community, and beginning its spread.

• libwww. Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-Francois Groff ported the WorldWideWeb application from the NeXT environment to the more common C language in 1991 and 1992, calling the new browser libwww. Groff later started the first web design company, InfoDesign.ch (status unknown).

• Line-mode. Nicola Pellow, a math student interning at CERN, wrote a line-mode web browser that would work on any device, even a teletype. In 1991, Nicola and the team ported the browser to a range of computers, from Unix to Microsoft DOS, so that anyone could access the web, at that point consisting primarily of the CERN phone book.

• Erwise. After a visit from Robert Cailliau, a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology joined together to write a web browser as a master’s project. Since the acronym for their department was called "OTH", they called the browser "erwise", as a joke on the word "otherwise". The final version was released in April, 1992, and included several advanced features, but wasn’t developed further after the students graduated and went on to other jobs.

• ViolaWWW. Pei Wei, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, released the second browser for Unix, called ViolaWWW, in May, 1992. This browser was built on the powerful interpretive language called Viola that Wei had developed for Unix computers. ViolaWWW had a range of advanced features, including the ability to display graphics and download applets.

• Midas. During the summer of 1992, Tony Johnson at SLAC developed a third browser for Unix systems, called Midas, to help distribute information to colleagues about his physics research.

• Samba. Robert Cailliau started development of the first web browser for the Macintosh, called Samba. Development was picked up by Nicola Pellow, and the browser was functional by the end of 1992.

• Mosaic. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from the NCSA released the first version of Mosaic for X-Windows on Unix computers in February, 1993. A version for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released a few months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support. Mosaic introduced support for sound, video clips, forms support, bookmarks, and history files, and quickly became the most popular non-commercial web browser. In August, 1994, NCSA assigned commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc., which subsequently licensed the technology to several other companies, including Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer. The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in January 1997.

• Arena. In 1993, Dave Raggett at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, England, developed a browser called Arena, with powerful features for positioning tables and graphics.

• Lynx. The University of Kansas had written a hypertext browser independently of the web, called Lynx, used to distribute campus information. A student named Lou Montulli added an Internet interface to the program, and released the web browser Lynx 2.0 in March, 1993. Lynx quickly became the preferred web browser for character mode terminals without graphics, and remains in use today.

• Cello. Tom Bruce, cofounder of the Legal Information Institute, realized that most lawyers used Microsoft PC’s, and so he developed a web browser for that platform called Cello, finished in the summer of 1993.

• Opera. In 1994, the Opera browser was developed by a team of researchers at a telecommunication company called Telenor in Oslo, Norway. The following year, two members of the team -- Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy -- left Telenor to establish Opera Software to develop the browser commercially. Opera 2.1 was first made available on the Internet in the summer of 1996.

• Internet in a box. In January, 1994, O’Reilly and Associates announced a product called Internet In A Box which collected all of the software needed to access the web together, so that you only had to install one application, instead of downloading and installing several programs. While not a unique browser in its own right, this product was a breakthrough because it distributed other browsers and made the web a lot more accessible to the home user.

• Navipress. In February, 1994, Navisoft released a browser for the PC and Macintosh called Navipress. This was the first browser since Berners-Lee’s WorldWideWeb browser that incorporated an editor, so that you could browse and edit content at the same time. Navipress later became AOLPress, and is still available but has not been maintained since 1997.

• Mozilla. In October, 1994, Netscape released the the first beta version of their browser, Mozilla 0.96b, over the Internet. On December 15, the final version was released, Mozilla 1.0, making it the first commercial web browser. The open source version of the Netscape browser released in 2002 was also named Mozilla in tribute to this early version.

• Internet Explorer. On August 23rd, 1995, Microsoft released their Windows 95 operating system, including a Web browser called Internet Explorer. By the fall of 1996, Explorer had a third of market share, and passed Netscape to became the leading web browser in 1999.

Many other browsers were also developed in the 1990’s to address niche requirements, several of which are listed below:

Resources. The following references provide more information about browser history:

• Browser applications -- lists sites that keep track of the different types of browsers which access them.

• evolt Browser archive -- contains a comprehensive repository of older browser applications.

• DejaVu.org -- maintains a browser history timeline and a fascinating set of older browser emulators.
  

  
  
  

  
   
   
   
  
  

  
  
   
  
  Mosaic浏览器如何引发数字革命？
  
  作者：ZDNet China
  2003年4月
  

        1993年4月22日，伊利诺斯大学的一个学生小组发明了一段旨在从各种公共网络上获取信息的程序。
  

       当时很少有人会预见这个叫Mosaic的程序将从根本上改变我们的日常生活。具有图形界面的网页浏览器 之前其实早已经诞生，但Mosaic是第一个被人普遍接受的浏览器，它把许多人推向了互联网。

  
  

       十年后的今天，我们不得不从各方面评估它对我们的影响，从全球经济，言论自由，节日购物到网上约会。
  
  

       4月22日就是 Mosaic 1.0诞生10周年的日子，我们的这篇特别报道将在透视Mosaic浏览器催生出的新技术，新行业的同时对它做一次历史回顾。

  
  
        第四天  未来：超越HTML的“后浏览器时代”
  

   

  
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  以上来自：http://www.zdnet.com.cn/

  
  
  

  Web browser

  
  

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
  

  A web browser is a software package that enables a user to display and interact with HTML documents hosted by web servers. The largest networked collection of these documents is known as the World Wide Web.
  

  Communication between the web server and the browser uses primarily the HTTP protocol. Most browsers also support other protocols, such as FTP, Gopher, and HTTPS (a SSL encrypted version of HTTP). Web browsers are able to retrieve documents stored in other file formats or in streams using these other protocols, but also using HTTP. This allows the author to embed images, animations, video and sound into a web page, or to make them accessible through the web page.
  

  Some of the more popular browsers include additional components to support Usenet news and e-mail via the NNTP, IMAP and POP protocols. Most web browsers have the ability to save a file of bookmarks for sites the user has visited (or will often want to).
  

  Early web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with Web interoperability. Modern web browsers (such as Mozilla, Opera, and Safari) support standards-based HTML and XHTML (starting with HTML 4.01), which should display in the same way across all browsers.
  

  Tim Berners-Lee introduced the first web browser, named WorldWideWeb, on February 26, 1991.
  

  
  

  
  
  

  
  

  Web and web browser features

  Different browsers can be distinguished from each other by the features they support. Modern browsers and web pages tend to utilise many features and techniques that did not exist in the early days of the web. Competition between Netscape and Microsoft for browser market-share in the mid 1990s helped oversee a rapid and chaotic expansion of browser and World Wide Web feature sets. The following is a list of some of these elements and features:
  

  
  

  
  
  • Ad filtering
    
  • HTML Tables (HTML 3.02) and table color
    
  • Frames and I-Frames
    
  • Plug-ins
    
  • Java
    
  • JavaScript
    
  • Fonts (size, color) and cascading style sheets
    
  • DHTML and XML
    
  • Established graphics file formats such as PNG (ersatz for GIF), JPEG, SVG
    
  • Session management
    
  • Tabbed browsing
  
  

  
  

  Examples of web browsers

  
  

  Graphical

  
  

  Gecko-based browsers

  
  
  
  
  • Mozilla
    
    
    
    • newer versions of Netscape Navigator (Netscape 6 and newer)
      
    • Beonex Communicator
      
    • Mozilla Firebird (formerly Phoenix)
      
    • IBM Web Browser for OS/2
      
    • Aphrodite
      
    • Galeon for GNOME
      
    • Salamander
      
    • Epiphany
      
    • Skipstone
      
    • K-Meleon for Windows
      
    • Camino for Mac OS X (formerly Chimera)
  
  

  
  

  Internet Explorer-based browsers

  
  
  
  
  • Internet Explorer
    
    
    
    • MyIE2
      
    • NetCaptor
      
    • Crazy Browser
      
    • NeoPlan