Netscape Navigator was the world’s first web browser developed for commercial purposes, and it dominated the market until Internet Explorer came out (with Explorer being bundled with Windows).
Netscape Navigator 1.0 launched on December 15th, 1994, and it quickly became the most popular browser in the world.
Up to that point, we’d all been using text based bulletin boards or Prestel type teletype services to “browse” the web. There was no Google search yet, but we had Gopher search and after Netscape Navigator’s release we got Yahoo search which was really a directory that was manually organised (early days!). AltaVista did some of the first actual web page indexing.
I remember my excitement at getting my first copy of Netscape Navigator. By then I’d moved off AmigaOS to Windows, and this was around Windows 3.1 days. But of course, websites were all text based to start with, so they had to also be adapted for HTML before they displayed more like we are used to seeing today.
See https://www.xda-developers.com/on-this-day-1994-netscape-navigator/
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