MacWeb is 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'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:
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:
