Cello added support for the img tag in 1993, before Netscape was ever released. At that point in time, I recall it was the second most popular GUI browser, behind NCSA Mosaic.
Cello lost to Mosaic, Mosaic lost to Navigator, humanity lost to IE, then IE lost to Firefox, Firefox lost to webkit, and now on HN we hand-wring about whether humanity is losing to Google or not.
I have had many, many conversations about the "Browser Wars" over the years and it's like talking about cross-border rivalries in the Midwest. Nobody can quite agree on who is the best or worst. Most people can't even agree about who was actually involved (is Ohio in the Midwest? People in Ohio say yes. People in the Mississippi River Valley say no).
Everybody who is anybody agrees that they all hate IE/Iowa.
I was trying to put together some timelines at one point and was reading biographies about Spyglass. Do you remember Spyglass? According to the founder, the Browser Wars were Spyglass versus IE (or was it Navigator?), and Spyglass won.
Why? Because he was only thinking about corporate computers. That was the universe to him. Places that we all know were barely on the Internet, he felt was "The Browser War".
I thought the first browser war was Mosaic vs Netscape, but as many think the IMG tag is the first real salvo in the war, Cello vs Mosaic is probably the first war, IE vs Netscape being #3.
Hello fellow old farts. I rememer browsing on Mosaic, Cello, Slipknot, Netscape, Arachne, Phoenix/Firefox. There were doubtless others I've forgotten.
Anybody remember the various 3D browsers that would visualize site relationships? Apple's Hotsauce was the first one I remember, though it was more of a text based meta browser. Then there were a few graphical windowing attmepts.
The first images I remember seeing on the internet were the Clementine lunar photos, slowly rendered line by line:
