Who created the first web browser?
Author: Sidekick Team
It happened in 1990. Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist, was working for the huge European nuclear research hub CERN when he found a way to make his fellow scientists more efficient. CERN researchers were using different computer platforms for work and they badly needed something that would facilitate data sharing among them.
Berners-Lee used the decades-old concept of hyperlinks and developed the first web server along with initial internet protocols and the first web browser. It took him two months to write the code that would change the world forever.
What was the first web browser called?
It was called WorldWideWeb (not to confuse with the World Wide Web). Later, to avoid confusion, the browser was renamed to Nexus. The first web browser was written on a NeXT computer.
What features did the first web browser have?
WorldWideWeb could display basic style sheets, and browse newsgroups. It also could download and display different files, including movies and sounds. The browser allowed editing and linking pages. The interfaced allowed navigation to the next or previous link on the last page visited.
What happened next?
In 1993, the release of the NCSA Mosaic browser, named for the support of multiple internet protocols, had put an end to WorldWideWeb’s popularity. The NCSA Mosaic, later, lost to Netscape Navigator and the latter, in turn, was defeated by the Internet Explorer during the so-called Browser Wars.
The Internet became mainstream by 1994, when general interest websites became available. This led to competition in software, commercialization of the Web, and the dot-com boom and bust in the early 2000s.
As the network grew, search engines were developed to index pages. By the late 1990s, the directory format started to give way to search engines, including Google Search. In 2008, the now near-monopoly Google Chrome was released. Around 200 different browsers were built up to date.
What happened to Tim?
Tim Berners-Lee, born in 1955, is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees the development of the Internet. He is also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.