November of 2003 marks the tenth anniversary of Mosaic, the first freely available graphic web browser. The use of Mosaic and other graphical browsers, especially Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Communicator (now AOL/Time Warner) has helped make access to the World Wide Web (WWW) available to an incredible number of users worldwide. The Web has lead to the creation of uncountable user communities, online commerce systems, and the exchange of information on a previously unimaginable scale. Graphical Web browsers have played and continue to play an important role in the evolution of these and other phenomina related to the Internet, yet few studies have been done on the evolution of graphical browsers.

This project, completed by Dr. Don Turnbull and Jennifer Jobst at the University of Texas at Austin during the spring and summer semesters of 2003, compares the evolution of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and AOL/Time Warner's Netscape Communicator web browsers. Both the Macintosh and Windows platforms were compared for both applications, from version 1.0 to the most recent version. Introductions of new features, trends in functionality and menu items were compared, and a release timeline and history for both applications and platforms were created.