The Finns Who Invented the Graphical Browser

waderoush writes "If you thought Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, think again. In their first major interview, three of the four Finnish software engineers behind Erwise — a point-and-click graphical Web browser for the X Window system — describe the creation of their program in 1991-1992, a full year before Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (which, of course, evolved into Netscape). Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, with their fellow Helsinki University of Technology student Kati Borgers (nee Suominen), gave Erwise features such as text searching and the ability to load multiple Web pages that wouldn't be seen in other browsers until much later. The three engineers, who today work for the architectural software firm Tekla, say they never commercialized the project because there was no financing — Finland was in a deep recession at the time and lacked a strong venture capital or angel investing market. Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier."

Comments

Correction.

[jcr]

The first web browser of all was WorldWideWeb.app, and it was a NeXTSTEP program. It was graphical from the beginning.

-jcr

Re:Correction.

[gEvil (beta)]

This page seems to supply the key point that's missing from the linked article:

Erwise was a popular web browser in the early days of the World Wide Web. At the time of its release in April 1992, one month prior to ViolaWWW, it was the world's first web browser with a graphical user interface for non-NeXT computers.

Re:Correction.

[elrous0]

WorldWideWeb.app was the first written for NeXt (and first one, period). Erwise was was the first one written for Unix. And Cello (or Mosaic?) was the first one written for Windows. You can try and parse it all you like, but you'll still have to give an American at least some of the credit. Sorry to spoil the pissing contest.