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CHAPTER 6

Browsing

By January 1993 the number of known servers was increasing faster, up to about fifty. The Erwise, Viola, and Midas browsers were generally available for use on the X Window system. Samba was working, though not complete, for the Mac. But to me it was clear there was growing competition among the browsers, even if it was on a small scale. Many of the people developing browsers were students, and they were driven to add features to their version before someone else added similar features. They held open discussions about these things on the www-talk mailing list, preserving the open social processes that had characterized Internet software development. But there was still an honorable one-upmanship, too.

One of the few commercial developers to join the contest was Dave Raggett at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, England. He created a browser called Arena. HP had a convention that an employee could engage in related, useful, but not official work for 10 percent