What was the first web browser?

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web together with Robert Cailliau, built the first working prototype in early 1991. That first prototype consisted of a web browser for the NeXTStep operating system. This first web browser, which was named "WorldWideWeb," had a graphical user interface and would be recognizable to most people today as a web browser. However, WorldWideWeb did not support graphics embedded in pages when it was first released.

Since WorldWideWeb had a graphical user interface (GUI), it could be called a graphical web browser. However, it did not display web pages with graphics embedded in them That did not happen until the arrival of NCSA Mosaic 2.0.

The first graphical web browser to become truly popular and capture the imagination of the public was NCSA Mosaic. Developed by Marc Andreessen, Jamie Zawinski and others who later went on to create the Netscape browser, NCSA Mosaic was the first to be available for Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh, and the Unix X Window System, which made it possible to bring the web to the average user.

Netscape is the browser that introduced most all of the remaining major features that define a web browser as we know it. The first version of Netscape appeared in October 1994 under the code name "Mozilla." Netscape 1.0's early beta versions introduced the "progressive rendering" of pages and images, meaning that the page begins to appear and the text can be read even before all of the text and/or images have been completely downloaded. In 1998, Netscape decided to release their browser source code as open source software, and the Mozilla project began.