MacWeb is an early, now discontinued
classic Mac OS
Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...
-only
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
for
68k and
PowerPC
PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...
Apple Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...
computers, developed by
TradeWave (formerly EINet) between 1994 and 1996.
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 disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...
s and
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...
s that were popular at the time. TradeWave also developed a similar
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
browser named
WinWeb. However, they were eclipsed by more full-featured competitors such as
Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in ...
, 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
An unofficial patch is a patch for a piece of software, created by a third party such as a user community without the involvement of the original developer. Similar to an ordinary patch, it alleviates bugs or shortcomings. Unofficial patches do no ...
"2.0c" was released by Antoine Hébert in 1998 to correct a problem on old machines not supporting color
QuickDraw
A quickdraw (also known as an extender) is a piece of climbing equipment used by rock and ice climbers to allow the climbing rope to run freely through protection such as a bolt anchors or other traditional gear while leading.
A quickdraw ...
.
Although one author in 1995 called MacWeb the second web browser released for the Macintosh, this is not quite true. The text-only
MacWWW
MacWWW, also known as Samba, is an early minimalist web browser from 1992 meant to run on Macintosh computers. It was the first web browser for the classic Mac OS platform, and the first for any non-Unix operating system. MacWWW tries to emulate t ...
browser became available in 1992, with the graphical
Mosaic
A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...
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
A webform, web form or HTML form on a web page allows a user to enter data that is sent to a Server (computing), server for processing. Forms can resemble form (document), paper or database forms because web users fill out the forms using checkboxe ...
*
bookmarks with import tool for Mosaic's bookmarks
* a
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
viewer
MacWeb pioneered the "click and hold" gesture to display a popup
contextual menu
A context menu (also called contextual, shortcut, and pop up or pop-up menu) is a menu in a graphical user interface (GUI) that appears upon user interaction, such as a right-click mouse operation. A context menu offers a limited set of choice ...
. This
mouse gesture
In computing, a pointing device gesture or mouse gesture (or simply gesture) is a way of combining pointing device or finger movements and clicks that the software recognizes as a specific computer event and responds to accordingly. They can be ...
was commonly used on the Macintosh before the prevalence of two-button mice on the Mac platform. MacWeb's preferences dialog allowed users to customize display styles on a per-tag basis similar to
Cascading style sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
System requirements
MacWeb has the following system requirements:
*
Operating System
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
:
Classic Mac OS
Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...
*
RAM
Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to:
Animals
* A male sheep
* Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish
People
* Ram (given name)
* Ram (surname)
* Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director
* RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch
* ...
: less than 700
KB RAM
*
HDD: 680 KB
References
Further reading
*
External links
MacWeb archiveon ''evolt.org''
Classic Mac OS-only web browsers
1994 software
Discontinued web browsers
{{web-software-stub