QUIZ – Web Browsers

After much deliberation, Sir Tim Berners-Lee chose the name WorldWideWeb for his program. He later changed it to Nexus to avoid confusion with the network which we all know as the World Wide Web.

Lynx, the text only web browser was created originally by a team of students at the University of Kansas. Thomas Dickey now looks after the development of the program. The browser is used primarily by the visually impaired.

Opera is the oldest GUI based browser in use today. It is still under active developed and has a decent-size user base. It was released a few months before Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which is the second oldest in the list above.

Thomas Bruce, who was at the Cornell Law School, realised that most lawyers use Windows and had no way of accessing the web. In June of 1993, he developed and released Cello as a shareware. It was the first web browser for the Windows operating system.

Multitorg web browser was created by Jon Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy when they were working at Telenor. They soon left the company and started on their own renaming the program Opera.

The first browser war took place between Netscape and Internet Explorer. Netscape Communicator was released in December 1994 by Netscape Communications, a company founded by Marc Andreessen, the co-creator of NCSA Mosaic, and Jim Clark. Very soon it was available for various operating systems including Windows, the most popular of them all. The browser was feature-rich and introduced JavaScript, the client side language which added interactivity to otherwise staid static web pages. Though the first version could be downloaded and used for free, Netscape was primarily a commercial product and quickly became the most used browser. However, all this changed in August of 1995 when Microsoft released Internet Explorer as a part of the Microsoft Plus! package for Windows 95. Soon it came bundled with the operating system. Windows users now had a default web browser on their computers and found no need to install a third party program. In just a few years, Interne Explorer decimated Netscape to became the number one web browser – it once boasted a market share of close to 95%.

Tabbed-browsing was introduced by Internetworks, an unknown browser today and probably little known during its days. It was developed by BookLink which was bought over by AOL.

Firefox from Mozilla holds a Guinness World Record for the largest number of downloads in 24 hours. Version 3 of the browser was dowloaded more than 8 million times. The next version surpassed that number but since there was no Guinness official to monitor the servers, the old record remained unbroken.

Private browsing was first implemented by Apple on their Safari web browser in 2005.

The Omnibox, a single field for URL and search phrase, was proposed by Mozilla for Firefox but introduced first by Google on their Chrome browser.