UdiWWW HTML3 Web Browser

A screenshot of UdiWWW showing its rendering capabilities
Original author(s)	Bernd Richter
Initial release	1995; 27 years ago (1995)
Final release	1.2.000 / April 9, 1996; 26 years ago (1996-04-09)
Written in	C/C++
Operating system	Windows 3.1 / 3.11 / NT / 95[1]
Size	1.7 MB (32-bit)[2] 570 KB (16-bit)[2]
Available in	English, German
Type	Web browser
License	Public domain[1]
Website	www.uni-ulm.de/~richter/udiwww/index.htm at the Wayback Machine (archived July 24, 1997)

UdiWWW is an early, now discontinued freeware graphical HTML 3.2 web browser for 16-bit and 32-bit Microsoft Windows. It was written and developed by Bernd Richter in C/C++ from 1995 to 1996. Following the release of version 1.2 in April 1996, Richter ceased development, stating "let Microsoft with the ActiveX Development Kit do the rest."^[2][3][4]

UdiWWW was among the first web browsers to support the then proposed HTML 3.0 standard.^[5][6][7] In doing so, it was also among the first browsers to support the specifications html math, html figures, and the PNG image format,^[7] which other leading browsers at the time such as Netscape and Internet Explorer 2.0 did not.^[8] The browser gained some popularity during 1996, but after development was abandoned, the browser fell out of favor.^{[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]}

The browser is no longer available from its original homepage. However, it (and its source) can still be downloaded from mirror sites.^[17][18]

History

UdiWWW was created for the UDINE Projekt (Universal Document Information and Navigation Environment). UDINE was started in 1992 and the goal was to "create a flexible, multimedia information system that is able to show different files (text, picture, audio, and video) with a similar user interface on different systems."^[19][20][21] To be able to read "web information" the UDINE project was expanded by a web browser. It was not able to integrate common browsers like the NSCA Mosaic because of the client-server architecture without modification. The source code of Mosaic was not available at that time, so the university started their own project. UDINE-WWW-Viewer was created and had most features of HTML 3 integrated.^[7][22][23]

Features

UdiWWW has the following features as of Version 1.2:^[24][25][26]

It also features a clock in the lower right hand corner that tells how long the browser has been up.

There is no official help file; rather, in the included .hlp file, Bernd Richter stated, "This help file was automatically created by the developing environment and is quite useless. As you know, UdiWWW is a 'One Man Show' and the author could not find time for writing help files."^[33]

Criticism

UdiWWW was criticized for lacking many advanced features like news, FTP, HTML4, Dynamic HTML, support for targeted windows, a "new window" command for launching multiple sessions, client side image mapping, and security. It was also seen to be slow.^[34]

Releases

The following versions were released:^[2][35][36]

32-Bit

16-bit

Notes

The browser was only available via download.

All releases were compressed using the PKSFX Self-Extract Utility Version 2.04g shareware version.

The browser's source, which has been released into the public domain, is available at Archive.org.

Technical

Start-up splash screen

The user agent for UdiWWW is UdiWWW/<version> so the latest one is UdiWWW/1.2.000.

A typical get request from the UdiWWW browser would be as follows:

GET http://www.wikipedia.org/ HTTP/1.0
Date:Sat, Mar 13, 2010 18:42:02 "GMT"
MessageID: <10031318024194304>
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: UdiWWW/1.2.000
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png
Accept: text/html;version=3.0, text/plain, */*

Although the browser's HTML3 support allows it to view most webpages, its lack of support for HTTP virtual hosting requires the use of a proxy server for many current websites.^[4]

System requirements

UdiWWW has the following system requirements:^[1]

• Processor: 80386 or better
• Operating system: Windows 3.1 / 3.11 / NT / 95^[1]
• Ram: 8 MB RAM
• A TCP/IP connection running Winsock