A Short History of Web Browsers

In terms of the use of a web browser by the mass public, the history of web browsers begins with LYNX.

LYNX is a simple text-based web browser primarily accessed via UNIX shell accounts that displays formatted HTML text (but not images). A sample of what you might see in a LYNX browser is seen below:

Though revolutionary when it was released, LYNX does not brag about its user-friendly design. As you can see, though LYNX is perhaps the fastest browser on the market because it does not need to worry about graphical display, it is also the ugliest for the exact same reason. LYNX's text-based interface is actually quite clumsy (unless you are a blind user in which case LYNX rocks for its speed and text-based simplicity where other browsers tend to be useless).

In fact, soon after the development of LYNX, as the concept of web browsing took off, web browsers would quickly evolve into the graphical web browser species beginning with Mosaic, Mozilla, and finally browsers such as Navigator and Explorer (there are dozens of other browsers of course, we just name the biggies). These browsers offered a truly user-friendly graphical interface that turned bland library-like document archives into an exciting electronic frontier.

Consider the same page as above, viewed in Netscape and Internet Explorer!

As you can see, the basic feature (display of HTML) of the most basic GUI web application tool (the browser) can have dramatically different results!

Understanding the Web Browser
Introduction to the Web Application Development Environment (Tools)
Basic User Interactivity with HTML Forms