America Online was a proprietary dial-up online service that eventually grew to offerer Internet access. In the mid 1990s AOL was very heavily promoted. Every month or two, you were sure to get a free AOL floppy disk or CD-ROM in the mail. AOL originated as PC-Link.
Firefox is a web browser based on the open source Mozilla web browser. It was intended to be lighter weight and faster than Mozilla, separating the e-mail client in to the new Thunderbird product. At release, it implemented better support for web standards than Microsoft Internet Explorer. Firefox included features such as tabbed browsing and support for add-ons.
Microsoft Internet Explorer is a web browser application created by Microsoft primarily for Microsoft Windows. It was initially based on Spyglass Mosaic. At various points, Internet Explorer was also available for MacOS, Solaris, and HP-UX.
Mozilla is an open source web browser based on a rewrite of the Netscape web browser. Netscape Communications Corporation released the source code in 1998 with the intent that it would be used as the core of next Netscape browser. Shortly after the release, Netscape Communications Corporation was acquired by AOL. Mozilla was used for the basis of Netscape 6.x and 7.x. Mozilla (later codenamed SeaMonkey) was eventually reworked and became Firefox.
First released in 1993, NCSA Mosaic was the first really popular web browser. Unlike the original browser, WorldWideWeb on NeXT, Mosaic was available for the Microsoft Windows platform and added features such as inline graphics viewing. It was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. NCSA Mosaic was distributed freely for non commercial use, but required a license for commercial business use. It was licensed by a number of third party OEMs, including Microsoft, who used it for the basis of Microsoft Internet Explorer. In 1995, its popularly quickly gave way to Netscape Navigator.
Netscape Navigator/Communicator was the first commercial web browser, displacing the free NCSA Mosaic. 1.0 was first released in December 1994, and initially offered advanced features such as progressively rendering pages as they loaded. It quickly gained many other features and capabilities and became the most popular web browser in the mid 1990s. One reason for its popularity, it was licensed freely for personal and non-profit use, although companies were expected to pay for a license. It later competed with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, and eventually was open sourced in to the Mozilla browser.
PATHWORKS is a network client suite that enables PCs to communicate with VMS and Ultrix systems from Digital Equipment Corporation.
Quarterdeck InternetSuite is a commercial internet connectivity package. It includes the Quarterdeck Mosaic web browser, Quaterdeck FTP, Quarterdeck Message Center, Quarterdeck Terminal, and a dialup networking system.
Quarterdeck Mosaic is a commercial web browser sold by the Quarterdeck corporation. At the time, it was faster, cleaner, more responsive, and more stable than Netscape. It had many new features that Netscape lacked, such as multiple child windows in a single window, a file/folder metaphor for bookmarks, a bookmark sidebar, right-click popup menus, and the ability for users to create annotations for each site. It also included a modem dialer and Quarterdeck's QWinsock. WebAuthor, WebTalk, and Quarterdeck WebServer.