alt Hacker NewsInteresting, for some reason I thought lynx was the first browser. I thought I read that a while ago.
But it makes sense it is a GUI browser since it was developed on a NeXT
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hinkley • today at 2:37 AM
IIRC, Viola also got scooped by Mosaic, which was the first browser most people used, before you could buy one shrinkwrapped at a store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW
There was also OmniWeb on the Next machine, but there weren't a lot of NeXT machines around.
Mosaic was the first browser to support images because HTML didn't support images and Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina sat in a coffee shop on campus while Marc talked himself into going rogue and making his own tag while Eric didn't talk him out of it (source, Eric Bina, ACM lecture at UIUC ca 1995)
WorldWideWeb didn't originally support inline images, and while using a graphical toolkit rendered pages more like Lynx, albeit with the ability to vary fonts. Lynx wasn't the first WWW browser, but came along shortly after, a year or so after WorldWideWeb, and is the oldest browser still maintained. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#Ear...
I'm having trouble pinning down when WorldWideWeb got inline image support, but based on https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/Feat... I'm guessing sometime between 1992 and 1994, when there are screenshots with inline images, so maybe after Lynx was published.