No free web browsers for Linux? [LWN.net]

No free web browsers for Linux?

Posted Apr 3, 2008 1:54 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: No free web browsers for Linux? by bajw
Parent article: WebKit rising

No, I didn't mean that at all. Where did that all come from?

Like many people, I didn't make much use of the web before Mosaic came out. It just didn't seem worth the trouble of moving past gopher, which is where all the really cool stuff was. I hope you'll agree that LWN understands the value of text, but there is a lot to be said for moving beyond curses for the user interface too. So, for many (probably most) people, Netscape was the only usable web browser on Linux for quite a few years. It seems a little weird that this point of view requires defending.

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No free web browsers for Linux?

Posted Apr 3, 2008 6:21 UTC (Thu) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

Mosaic has been mentioned, but there was also mMosaic. Sun had a great GUI browser for Linux
in which all windows existed inside the main browser panel. It even came with its own
webserver. It resembled early Opera alarmingly. Gopher was great, but never WAIS time on just
one technology available for the Archie-tecture. Probably the most creative GUI brwsers to be
found operated via LambdaMOO - the Emacs of the gaming world at the time.