IBM WebExplorer

~ the eulogy ~

I missed this one on hardware grounds, which is the cleanest kind of miss there is. WebExplorer only ran on OS/2, and OS/2 was never on a home machine in Turkey. The beige clone you bought from a shop in Ankara in 1998 came with Windows on it, and OS/2 was a thing you read about in computer magazines as an operating system that was supposedly better and that nobody you knew had.

The work started inside IBM in June 1994, while the company was assembling the Internet Access Kit for OS/2 Warp. It went out with Warp that autumn and it was good: Internet Magazine called it the best browser going in its November 1994 issue, at a moment when the competition was early Mosaic and early Netscape. Wikipedia's infobox dates the first release to 27 November 1995, a year after people demonstrably had it in their hands, and no source I found reconciles those two.

Then IBM dismantled the development team. Almost immediately after Warp 3 shipped, according to the record, which means the company broke up the group that made its browser within months of the browser being praised as the best one available. Development continued in some reduced form for four more years, but the decision had already been taken.

~ the dossier ~

~ the throbber ~

Two features are worth exhuming. The first is the throbber, the animation in the corner that spins while a page loads. WebExplorer let you replace it, driven by non-standard HTML tags of IBM's own invention, so a site could take over the browser's own status animation. Netscape's throbber was a fixed piece of branding. IBM's was a slot anybody could fill, which was either generous or a security problem depending on which decade you evaluate it from.

The second is the webmap. WebExplorer could draw your browsing history as a diagram of where you had been and how the pages connected, rather than as a list of page titles in reverse order. This was a genuine attempt to solve getting lost, and it has been reinvented and abandoned roughly once a decade since. It also supported HTML 3.0 tables and Java applets, and it carried a Usenet reader inside the browser, which in 1995 was a serious feature list.

~ what really happened ~

OS/2 Warp 4 arrived in 1996 with WebExplorer in the box and a link to download an OS/2 build of Netscape Navigator 2.02 sitting next to it. That link went in late, too late to make the pressing of the CD comfortably, because IBM had already decided to substitute somebody else's browser for its own inside its own product. A 1996 PC Magazine review made the reasoning legible: the OS/2 version was short on standard features and weak on multimedia, while a separate IBM-distributed build based on Spyglass Mosaic code was much better.

Version 1.2 came out on 25 November 1998 anyway. That is the strangest fact in this grave. A company that had given up on a product in 1994, and had publicly replaced it in 1996, was still cutting releases of it in late 1998, because OS/2 customers were under support contracts and something had to be shipped to them.

~ the long tail ~

OS/2 outlived its desktop life in places where nobody browses. Banks ran it in branches and inside cash machines well into the 2000s, long after IBM had stopped pretending it was a consumer operating system, and there is a decent chance that a machine which once had WebExplorer sitting unused on its drive dispensed money to somebody this century.

The lesson is corporate rather than technical. IBM had a good browser, early, with a review calling it the best one, on an operating system it controlled completely. It took the team apart before the web had finished being invented. Netscape and Microsoft spent the following four years fighting over the thing IBM had already put down.

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