MacWeb

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

MacWeb
Developer(s)TradeWave
Initial releaseMay 31, 1994 (1994-05-31)
Stable release
2.0 / 1996 (1996)
Operating systemClassic Mac OS
TypeWeb Browser
LicenseFreeware
WebsiteN/A

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:

gollark: It does also mean "bad" as well as "good".
gollark: Hmm, I kind of like that actually.
gollark: Yes, but some people make grammatical/spelling errors, and I *try* and compensate for them.
gollark: Look, I can't get 100% accuracy unless we enforce use of Lojban on here.
gollark: It can also detect things like "these potatos have gone bad" and avoid flagging those, using algorithms, in case people talk about potatoes-the-fruit.

References
  1. December, John; Randall, Neil (1994). World Wide Web Unleashed. Sams Publishing. p. 234ff. ISBN 0-672-30617-4.
  2. Morgan, Eric Lease (1995-09-26). "Chapter 3: Macintosh-based WWW Browsers". Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: A Macintosh-Based World Wide Web Starter Kit Featuring MacHTTP and Other Tools. version 1.0h. Retrieved 2017-09-05.
  3. Adams, Chris. "MacWeb 1.x hints and tips". Retrieved 2017-09-05.
  4. Engst, Adam C (1995). "Chapter 25: World Wide Web". Internet Starter Kit for the Macintosh (3rd ed.). Hayden Books. ISBN 9781568301976. Retrieved 2017-09-05.

Further reading
  • December, John; Randall, Neil (1994). World Wide Web Unleashed. Sams Publishing. p. 234ff. ISBN 0-672-30617-4.


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