MacWeb

MacWeb was an early classic Mac OS-only web browser for 68k and PowerPC Apple Macintosh computers, developed by TradeWave (formerly EINet) between 1994 and 1996.^[1]

MacWeb's major attraction was its ability to run well on low-end hardware footprints as well as fast page display. This compactness led to MacWeb's inclusion on many "Internet starter kit" floppy disks and CD-ROMs that were popular at the time. TradeWave also developed a similar Microsoft Windows browser named WinWeb. However, they were eclipsed by more full-featured competitors such as Netscape Navigator, and development was eventually abandoned.

Versions

The first public release was 0.98-alpha on May 31, 1994, and the final official release was version 2.0 in 1996. An unofficial patch "2.0c" was released by Antoine Hébert in 1998 to correct a problem on old machines not supporting color QuickDraw.

Although one author in 1995 called MacWeb the second web browser released for the Macintosh,^[2] this is not quite true. The text-only MacWWW browser became available in 1992, with the graphical Mosaic released for the Mac the next year.

Features

MacWeb was a basic browser that contained features common to most browsers such as:

• support for HTML forms^[1]
• bookmarks with import tool for Mosaic's bookmarks^[1]
• a HTML viewer^[1]

MacWeb pioneered the "click and hold" gesture to display a popup contextual menu. This mouse gesture was commonly used on the Macintosh before the prevalence of two-button mice on the Mac platform.^[3] MacWeb's preferences dialog allowed users to customize display styles on a per-tag basis similar to Cascading style sheets^[4]

System requirements

MacWeb has the following system requirements:

• Operating System: Classic Mac OS^[1]
• RAM: less than 700 KB RAM^[1]
• HDD: 680 KB

References

Further reading

• December, John; Randall, Neil (1994). World Wide Web Unleashed. Sams Publishing. p. 234ff. ISBN 0-672-30617-4.  |access-date= requires |url= (help)

External links

• MacWeb archive on evolt.org