Matthew Miner

WorldWideWeb Emulator

This is fun: you can now run WorldWideWeb, the world’s first web browser, inside your fancy-pants 21st century web browser.

Other than enormous site maps and special characters appearing as hexadecimal gibberish, article-focused websites like Wikipedia and The New York Times are surprisingly usable. This blog, with the current design’s austere lack of ornamentation, looks almost the same.

WorldWideWeb emulator showing this blog post

No images though, and definitely no JavaScript (it wasn’t invented for another five years), so don’t build your guide for 90s time travellers in React.

Something you can do is immediately edit a page after loading it, right there in the browser. I suppose this made sense in the days when every page was a static HTML file. Simpler times.

Also, check out those scrollbars on the left side of the window. Barbaric times.