In order to surf the web, you need a web browser, and today there are several different ones to choose from. If you're looking for a lean, no-nonsense browser, Chrome is the one for you. Internet Explorer still stands as the odds on favorite when you want to make sure pages load correctly (not because of superior standards support, but because its majority market share have driven developers to code their webpages to look best on IE). Firefox has found more than a niche market by giving users near endless customization, and Apple's Safari purports to run circles around everyone else (it doesn't). And then there's the cornucopia of alternative browsers and browser shells, like Flock (Firefox-based) and Avant (IE-based).

No matter which browser you choose to surf the web with, the features you take for granted today are the result of nearly two decades of browser design. On the following pages, we'll take you through a visual tour, in chronological order, of every major PC-based (read: not Mac) web browser that ever was, starting with the very first one: WorldWideWeb. We'll tell you what made each one unique and, when applicable, what it contributed to modern browser development.

WorldWideWeb

First Released: 1991

By most accounts, WorldWideWeb is regarded as the first web browser. The groundwork that would eventually lead to WorldWideWeb began in the late 1980s, the same decade MTV was launched and the Commodore 64 was still going strong. Officially introduced in 1991, WorldWideWeb could display basic style sheets and was the only way to see the web. The navigation menu contained "back," "next," and "previous" buttons, but the browser also served as an editor. WorldWideWeb would later be renamed to Nexus "in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space," writes Tim Berners-Lee, the browser's developer.

Image Credit: Tim Berners-Lee (w3.org)

Erwise

First Released: 1992

Some online literature regards Mosaic as the world's first graphical point-and-click browser, but that distinction actually belongs to Erwise. Developed by four Finnish students at the Helsinki University of Technology, Erwise was designed for Unix computers running the X Windows System.

Advanced for its time, Erwise had the ability to search for words on webpages. If it didn't find the word it was looking for, it would scour the internet, up to 12 pages at a time, to try to find it. Erwise could also load multiple pages at the same time, but despite all the innovation and promise, it was never commercialized, the result of a "horrible recession" in Finland at the time.

Image Credit: xconomy.com

ViolaWWW

First Released: 1992

Before the Web entered into the mainstream, a limited audience would see the introduction of the ViolaWWW browser. One of the earliest browsers, ViolaWWW was launched in May 1992. It was written by Pei-Yuan Wei, a University of California student, and like Erwise, was built for Unix and the X Windowing System. This gave the browser a limited audience.

Image Credit: xcf.berkley.edu

Notable features include the ability to use multifont text, functioning within a single windows operation and the ability to clone a copy of a document in other windows, inclusion of a History window, "Home", "Back", and "Forward" buttons, online help buttons, and even bookmarks.

MidasWWW

First Released: 1992

Another X browser, MidasWWW was released in November of 1992. It was developed by Tony Johnson at SLAC, who named it Midas for 'Motif Interactive Data Analysis Shell.'

A popular browser among fellow physicists, Johnson had little interest in further developing MidasWWW. However, a colleague would translate it to run on VAX computers, making MidasWWW the first of only a small number of dedicated browsers for VAXes.

One of the few innovations of MidasWWW was that hyperlinks changed color after you clicked on them. It was also the first browser to make use of plug-ins.

Lynx

First Released: 1992

Although Erwise had already broken ground with a graphical interface, Lynx, also released in 1992, was a text-only browser originally developed by the University of Kansas to distribute campus information. It would later find an audience with the visually impaired because of its text-to-speech interface.

In 1993, a student named Lou Montulli added an Internet interface to the application and released it as Lynx 2.0. This became popular for character mode terminals that didn't rely on graphics, although Lynx does possess the ability to launch external applications to handle images and videos.

You can still use Lynx today - above is a screenie we grabbed while running Lynx 2.8.5rel.1 on top of Vista 64-bit (download).