alt Hacker NewsCERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)
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WorldWideWeb – the first web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591 - Jan 2023 (18 comments)
The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839 - April 2021 (21 comments)
The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 - Nov 2020 (8 comments)
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939929 - Oct 2020 (7 comments)
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 - Feb 2019 (45 comments)
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild: 2019 rebuilding of the original NeXT web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19183316 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
Fun fact: Erwise[0] was the first _graphical_ browser developed by a group of students in Helsinki University of Technology with Sir Berners Lee. Sadly there was no funding in Finland available at the time and they had to abandon the project and most of the group ended up working at Tekla, contributing to a bunch of cool AEC CAD technology (Tekla is now a Trimble subsidiary).
It's a real shame both Job's movies skip right over his NeXT and Pixar days..
In 1983 he predicted 10-15 years until home network connectivity is "solved". 10 years later the world wide web released to the public, originally developed on his company's NeXT platform in 1989..
Direct link to the browser: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/
It has been about 16 years since I fired up my old NeXTStation Color where I had a copy of 1.0 or a late beta.
The last time I tried about the only site that worked was useit.com, former home of Nielsen Norman UX experts ;-)
I love what the CERN team did here visually with the NeXT UI. Rebuilding a historical browser inside a modern one is a fun rabbit hole, but man, it is the same technical wall to hit every time: iframes.
You build this beautiful retro UI, you wire up the address bar, and then you try to load a modern site and just hit a wall of CORS, X-Frame-Options, and CSP blocks. Which, tho is probably precisely things should work. Otherwise people arbitrarily iframe the open web opening up a massive clickjacking-pocalypse. It makes total sense for security....sigh.
But I sitll wanted a way to get around it to capture that 90s nostalgia (tho NeXT and this browser were actually from the late 80s), the real open web inside a retro recreation not just a crippled, iframe-blocked imitation. Or "everything links to archive org" stuff.
To make that work, I had to make a custom embedder API. It basically pipes a fully isolated remote Chromium instance right into the retro shell through an iframe in a custom element. The engine is real, and it respects the native security boundaries because the browser is physically isolated, but it wears that heavy 90s UI so you get the 90s feel.
If you want to mess around with a different flavor of 90s nostalgia that can actually surf the modern web, I put up a live version here: https://win9-5.com/demo. Sound on for the retro modem dial-up elevator music. The non-graybeards may never have experienced the modem's mating call in the wild.
I wish someone would write a reference implementation in a functional language.
At least that would formalize the specification.
When watching this I'm shocked how bad the UX Was these days. The scrollbar left, the triple steped menu... What was improved sometimes is only visible when we see how it was back in the past.
It's a javascript-based imitation, much like all of those js-based imitations of various Windows versions.
The original source code isn't really involved, which is a shame, since it is actually available.
IMHO this should have been (something along the lines of) GNUstep + TimBL's original code (mirror: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb) + Emscripten + getting Emscripten to work with ObjC. Now, that would have been cool.
This is the most commented HN posting on this from that time (2019):
That makes me think about the whatng cartel apocalypse.
People lost themselves, forgetting how important noscript/basic (x)html (aka basic HTML forms, nowdays which could be augmented with <audio> and <video>)) has been for web technical independence.
All that is very sad, and toxic.
i want to meet those people who did this originally in 1989 and to ask them, did they ever think it would be this today?
Better than chrome!
(2019)
Some previous discussions:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839
> The WWW project does not take responsability
I guess that let them off the hook for incorrect spelling. :-)
Links where called Pointers back then apparently.
network users at that time already had software for ftp and other common tools. Gopher sort of linked logically to an ftp idea. Mosaic was often introduced in the same sentence as "uses a format called HTML" .. Mosaic seemed interesting but also it was obvious that pages in that format would have to become popular, to make more of them. There wasn't a big reason to switch your daily software to Mosaic since stable apps were better for their existing uses. It was a very rare thing to have access to a NeXT machine (maybe not on YNews).
From my point of view it was Netscape that made a big splash, a year+ later, with a lot of publicity and good graphic design. Mosaic itself was an awkward demo with an interesting nerdy story.
No link to EDH.
All the links should point to the 1989 internet instead of "Not Found"
:-)
Interesting, for some reason I thought lynx was the first browser. I thought I read that a while ago.
But it makes sense it is a GUI browser since it was developed on a NeXT
You can't fix a broken wheel. Let the downvotes illustrating the ignorance of HN pop culture start....
This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser as a web page, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel.
The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why:
https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t=961
Some of the comments of youtube are fun too.
This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better.
Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit.
The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all:
https://youtu.be/gGw09RZjQf8?t=147
https://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc?t=234
Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely:
Early Croquet demo (there are several others): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZO7av2ZFB8
Croquet in webbrowser: https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine/
Demo of webbrowser replacement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM
Squeak and all its predecessors: https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org
Etoys: https://squeak.js.org/etoys/
In 1992ish I worked at RNEC Manadon (UK, Devon). I was asked by my boss to investigate this new www thing.
I telnetted to the nearest VAX from my Win 3.1 PC. I then telnetted to the X.25 PAD and used that to go via the US to Switzerland and CERN. It looked just like gopher and WAIS to me and that's how I reported back - "it looks the same as gopher".
When Tim BL invented www, html and that, browsers were telnet and graphics was a nonsense.