Interesting, 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

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.

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WillAdams 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well there was this image:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-cern...

	▲	wahern 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		WorldWideWeb could display images, but originally only in a separate window when you clicked on them, similar to the way audio, PDFs, and other multimedia worked (and sometimes still work). The wording of one of the people involved seems to confirm this: > How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture of a band ever to be clicked on in a web browser!" Source: https://musiclub.web.cern.ch/bands/cernettes/firstband.html

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dunham 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's been a very long time, but my recollection was the Mosaic did images first, and it was non-standard. (The beginning of the end.) I might be thinking of some other feature though.

I was also disappointed that the editing went away after the first browser. (There was "Amaya" which had editing, but it was a research thing and not a commonly used browser.)

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hinkley 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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)