IBM WebExplorer displaying wikipedia
Spanish IBM WebExplorer displaying wikipedia in 2004
IBM WebExplorer was an early web browser designed at IBM facilities in the Research Triangle Park for OS/2.
Name
Not to be confused with IBM Web Browser, a later program based on Mozilla, or with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
History
Presented in 1994 with OS/2 Warp (v3), it was hailed as the best browser by Internet Magazine in their November issue[citation needed] and leveraged its position as the only native browser in OS/2 at that time. Almost immediately after the introduction of OS/2 Warp version 3, IBM dismantled the development team and that relegated the WebExplorer to the annals of history. IBM WebExplorer, at that time, was the browser application to beat. OS/2 Warp 4 (1996) included it, but also included a link to download an OS/2 version of Netscape Navigator 2.02, which was late for shipping on CD. IBM had already planned the substitution of WebExplorer.
Features
- Support for HTML 3.0 (with tables)
- Usenet reader
- Some of its parts were scriptable with Rexx. Some external companies used this capability to offer an enhanced browser with IBM's rendering engine
- A page could define what the animated throbber should look like. It was implemented through a non-standard <frame> HTML tag. OS/2 users created several animations[1]. The latter introduction of Web frames leads WebExplorer to confusion on modern pages
- A presentation mode without visible menu bars
- A menu option Links collecting all the links in the page. It was used by IBM VoiceType for voice navigation
- Java applets
References
- ^ "hobbes.nmsu.edu". hobbes.nmsu.edu. Archived from the original on Jul 05, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070705094652/http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/h-browse?sh=1&dir=/pub/multimedia/video/webexani. Retrieved on 2009-04-20.
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
