List of Internet pioneers
Nicola Pellow, one of the nineteen members of the "WWW Project" at CERN working with Tim Berners-Lee, is recognized for developing the first cross-platform internet browser, Line Mode Browser, that displayed web-pages on dumb terminals and was released in May 1991. She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate math student enrolled in a sandwich course at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University). She left CERN at the end of August 1991, but returned after graduating in 1992, and worked with Robert Cailliau on MacWWW, the first web browser for the classic Mac OS.
History of the web browser
However, the explosion in popularity of the Web was triggered by NCSA Mosaic which was a graphical browser running originally on Unix and soon ported to the Amiga and VMS platforms, and later the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1.0 was released in September 1993, and was dubbed the killer application of the Internet. It was the first web browser to display images inline with the document's text. Prior browsers would display an icon that, when clicked, would download and open the graphic file in a helper application. This was an intentional design decision on both parts, as the graphics support in early browsers was intended for displaying charts and graphs associated with technical papers while the user scrolled to read the text, while Mosaic was trying to bring multimedia content to non-technical users. Mosaic and browsers derived from it had a user option to automatically display images inline or to show an icon for opening in external programs. Marc Andreessen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quit to form a company that would later be known as Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape released its flagship Navigator product in October 1994, and it took off the next year.