Art of browsing develops to expand worldwide view

As the Web browser celebrates its 10th anniversary, Karlin Lillington looks back at the initial invention of this tool, which transformed business and communications methods, and charts its progress to the present day

Happy birthday, Web browser. The revolutionary little software tool that brought the World Wide Web into being is 10 years old. And revolutionary it most certainly is.

Without it, it's doubtful the Web would have had the explosive growth of the past decade (although, without it, we wouldn't have had to suffer the sillier manifestations of the dotcom era). Because without a browser, the Web doesn't exist at all.

Although the Web has become synonymous with the internet, they are actually not the same thing. As the authors of How the Web was born explain in their comprehensive history, "the internet is like a network of electronic roads criss-crossing the planet - the much-hyped information superhighway. The Web is just one of the many services using the network."

Well, hardly "just". While an embryonic internet had been in existence since the late 1960s - more than 20 years before the first publicly available browser was released in 1993 - it took just two years for it to become the dominant way people accessed the internet.

There's a simple reason for this. Before the Web, using the internet was difficult. First of all, hardly anyone could get online, with internet access limited to government, academic, military and large corporate use (and even then, really only technology companies).

And even if you could get online, users had to use text commands to navigate around the Net. To have a look at some information - for example, a document held on a university computer system in California - you had to type in the correct command to transfer the file back to your computer. People spent a lot of time plaguing computer support staff for reminders of what you needed to type to use FTP (file transfer protocol), or how to use search tools like Gopher and Archie.

How much easier to simply click on a hyperlink! The huge leap in ease provided by the Web browser came from moving this text-and-typing based way of communicating to a visual method, using embedded links and mouse clicks.

Although the mouse and the concept of the hyperlink had been around for a while, it took one man to put them together and thus bring the World Wide Web (his term, too) into being. The man is British computer scientist Mr Tim Berners-Lee, who was working for CERN, the famed Swiss physics laboratory.

He wrote the first Web browser on a NeXT computer, finishing it on Christmas Day 1990. He demonstrated it before a group of CERN researchers in March 1991, launching its distribution into the wider research community.

Over the next three years, several others took a stab at modifying the basic browser idea. But it took a young student at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois to make the "world" in World Wide Web more than just an ambitious term.

The tall and lanky student, Mr Marc Andreesen, along with fellow student Mr Eric Bina, got hold of the Mr Berners-Lee browser. Inspired, they came up with a new browser they called Mosaic, offering it over the Web in early 1993.

Mosaic had crucial additions to the basic Berners-Lee concept: it supported sound files and video clips, enabled users to add forms to Web pages, and introduced bookmarks (favourites) and history files.

With forms, e-commerce was given its basic Web infrastructural support. Bookmarks and favourites let people personalise their browsers and turn them into an information and entertainment resource. Mosaic took off like a storm.

Mosaic ultimately became Netscape, the company that, through its spectacular initial public offering, started the whole dotcom boom and made Mr Andreesen a figurehead of the emerging "new economy".

Microsoft famously took several years to take the Web seriously, only introducing its Internet Explorer (IE) browser in 1995. The so-called "browser wars" had begun.

At first, people scoffed at Microsoft's ability to make a dent in Netscape's total dominance of the browser "market" (if a free commodity can be said to be part of a market). But by 1999 IE surpassed Netscape in market share - and had become Exhibit A in the US Department of Justice's huge antitrust suit against the software giant.

Other browsers have come along since Mosaic, each having its fans: Opera, Mozilla, Arena, Cello and Safari among them, but IE - at least for now -- still reigns supreme. It's also grown enormously fat.

These days, we want to be able to stream radio and play songs, do searches, easily import and export files, and add on new software extensions through our browsers. But the ancestral Lucy to today's megabyte monster remains Mr Andreesen's Mosaic.

Who would have thought one little college project would change the world? But that is just what the browser has done - linking people and places, creating fortunes and losing some of them, helping people create totally new kinds of companies, and bringing the world directly to your desktop.