Ancient Web Browsers

Browser Archive

This site archives browsers developed between late 1990 and mid-1993. A large archive of later browsers is hosted at browsers.evolt.org.

Below you can find links to versions of each browser archived here.

Note: The aim of this archive is to store a copy of all release versions of each ancient browser, but some are missing. Worse, some entire browsers are missing. If you can help find missing versions of browsers, please get in touch.

Missing Browsers

These browsers may be lost.

Dan Connolly's X/Tcl browser (October 1991)
Jim Whitescarver's "W3" curses browser (November 1992)
David Rashty's VMS browser (July 1993)

CERN Browsers

WorldWideWeb / Nexus: The original browser. Renamed "Nexus" for the 2.0.1 release in 1994.
: Earliest recorded version: 0.4 (30 January 1991). Earliest archived version: 0.12 (19 August 1991).
LineMode: Nicola Pellow's original portable browser.
: Earliest recorded version: dated 11 February 1991. Earliest archived version: 0.11a (15 August 1991).
MacWWW / SAMBA: Nicola Pellow and Robert Cailliau's browser for the Macintosh.
: Earliest recorded version: 1.00. Earliest archived version: 1.03.

Independent Browsers

ViolaWWW: Pei-Yuan Wei's adaptation of his extensible Viola hypertext application for HTML; also the recommended browser within CERN for a time.
: Earliest recorded version: dated 9 March 1992. Earliest archived version: 2.0.4 (4 April 1992).
Erwise: The work of Helsinki University of Technology undergrads Kim Nyberg, Teemu Rantanen, Kati Suominen, and Kari Sydänmaanlakka.
: Only version: beta 0.1 (26 July 1992).
tkWWW: Joseph Wang's excellent Tcl/Tk browser and editor; also the only editor among the non-NeXT browsers.
: Earliest recorded version: 0.1 alpha (25 July 1992). Earliest archived version: 0.7 alpha (1 May 1993).
MidasWWW: Tony Johnson of SLAC's Motif browser, notable for its ability to display PostScript files.
: Earliest recorded/archived version: 1.0 (Nov 1992).
w3browser / FineWWW: Tom Fine's elegant Perl terminal browser, also known as FineWWW and PerlWWW.
: Earliest recorded/archived version: 0.1 (25 November 1992).
Lynx: Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe, and Charles Rezac's famous terminal browser. Lynx now has the distinction of being the oldest continuously-maintained web browser.
: Earliest recorded WWW-capable version: 2.0 alpha (11 March 1993). Earliest archived version: 2.0.11 (25 August 1993).
Cello: Thomas R. Bruce's pioneering Windows browser.
: Earliest recorded/archived version: Beta 0.1 (8 June 1993).