History of browsers

ViolaWWW, first developed in the early 1990’s for Unix computers running X and was the most commonly used browser to access the WWW or World Wide Web being recommended by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Viola was the invention of  a student at the University of California Experimental Computing Facility in Berkeley, Pei-Yuan Wei. According to James Gillies and Robert Cailliau who wrote a book on Viola WWW: "Viola was to become the first X-browser to make any impact, but even his early versions went down well at CERN...As this ViolaWWW developed, it was to set the standard for everything to follow it..."

Erwise (April 1992) was the second web browser ever made and the first to be commonly available with a graphical user interface (GUI). GUI is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with images rather than text commands. It was made by four Finnish students at the Helsinki university of technology: Kim Nyberg, Teemu Rantanen, Kati Suominen and Kari Sydänmaanlakka.Their vision was to create a more advanced, and easier and user-friendly web browser. The browser was written for Unix computers running X and used the W3 or WWW library 

Mosaic (1993) was really the first Web browser which opened up and popularized the W3 to the public. It had a simple, understandable interface. It was also the first browser to display images online next to text instead of displaying images in a separate window. Even 18 years after Mosaic's release, the most popular browsers, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, have kept many of the features of the original Mosaic graphical user interface (GUI). David Thompson first ested ViolaWWW and showed it to Marc Andreessen, who along with Eric Bina designed and programmed NCSA Mosaic (xmosaic) for Unix's X Window System.