The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development, and is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation. His browser was called WorldWideWeb and later renamed Nexus.
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 almost 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.
Microsoft Internet Explorer is by far the most common web browser in use as of this writing. Internet Explorer 1.0, released in August 1995, broke no important new ground in a way that became part of a future standard. Later versions of Internet Explorer quickly caught up; Internet Explorer 3.0 was very close to Netscape 2.0's feature set.
In July 1996, Internet Explorer 3.0 beta introduced the first useful implementation of cascading style sheets, which allow better control of the exact appearance of web pages.
In April 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 introduced the first quality implementation of the Document Object Model (DOM), which allows Javascript to modify the appearance and content of a web page after it has been loaded.
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